[Ilugc] Startup Orion offers ready-to-go Linux cluster
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Tue Aug 31 13:01:12 2004
Some time ago, I saw a demo of a similar box containing 8 Celeron nodes
The old VA Linux boxes were along similar lines - now they've moved on
to Itanium 2s after the merger with California Digital - as per
Anand Babu's talk on the LLNL Thunder.
I can't believe they chose Transmeta for a HPC box. Transmeta CPUs have
a history sacrificing performance for low power consumption. The VIA
C3s would have been a better option. Or wait until the desktop versions
of the Pentium-M is launched next quarter.
I agree completely - they could have gone with the Athlon 64 mobiles, or
the Banias, Dothan, Via C3 or PIII mobiles. Transmeta, however, has
an on-chip Northbridge (with Hypertransport on the Efficeon) and very low
power consumption, so it's easier to integrate 12 CPUs on a single board.
Just an engineering tradeoff, but bad from a performance standpoint.
Also the fact that the Orion founder (Colin Hunter) was also a co-founder of
Transmeta seems to have played a role.
Just want to add that the Tyan Tiger is an exceptionally good product
I'd have to agree again, but I haven't played with the Opteron boards.
If somebody has got x86-64 linux running on them with a usable distro,
could they please post their experiences?
-Siva
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