[ Thanks to Douglas Eadline for this
link. ]
“Whenever someone asks what hardware to buy for their new
cluster, the answer is always, ‘It depends.’ It depends on what
application the cluster will be used for, it depends on how much
space, power, and cooling are available, it depends on the costs of
operating the cluster, and it depends on how much the parts that
might be used cost. The standard process is to analyze the
application and use rules of thumb and experience to guess what
hardware will work best. The sophistication of the analysis depends
on how much money is involved and how much computer engineering
expertise the designer has.“Large clusters, with price tags in the millions of dollars,
justify spending a lot of effort to characterize the applications
that will run on them and to design the best system for those
applications…”