The installation started at 8 a.m. and was complete by 6 p.m. Good news travels fast, and within four days of the installation, AC 3 's membership roster had grown to 15 companies. The final, assembled cluster featured 64 PowerEdge 6350 servers, each one rack-mountable and loaded with four Intel Pentium III Xeon processors. Since the initial installation, an 8-way PowerEdge 8450 has been added as well. Also part of the cluster are eight PowerVault 200S SCSI storage systems, and one PowerVault 130T tape library. If Velocity's fast implementation is remarkable, its implications on the costs of high-performance computing are astounding.
Cost savings start with the initial equipment purchase.
The next level of savings comes when the workload has grown too heavy for the original configuration, and it's time to boost performance with an upgrade. Traditional supercomputing architectures are like a wagon team that can only add horsepower in very large increments. Cluster architectures, on the other hand, are highly scalable, enabling the equivalent of adding a pair of horses at a time as the system load creeps upwards. Results CTC's directors believe AC 3 is poised to play a vital role in the coming of age of cluster computing. The performance gap between Intel chips and UNIX and RISC-based systems is closing rapidly.