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is it worth the cost?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Oct 09, 2007 4:52 AM EDT |
What's the point of clustering? I don't see the advantage- why not go for a nice stout mainframe? A brand-new IBM z9 runs about $100,000, which isn't cheap, but then you have a single super-duper well-built machine. Instead of a herd of lesser machines, which are more complex to administer, presents more points of failure, and eat up more space and more power. |
| jdixon Oct 09, 2007 5:04 AM EDT |
> ...why not go for a nice stout mainframe? Probably inertia and familiarity. When Google first started, they wouldn't have been able to afford a mainframe, so they went with a small cluster. That's what they've used and what they know. |
| bigg Oct 09, 2007 4:38 AM EDT |
One reason (as I've seen firsthand) is to use the computers they've already got more efficiently. A secretary's computer sits idle all night and all weekend, in other words, most of the time. If you start looking around, you find that most computers spend more time collecting dust than doing work. To the researcher with heavy computing needs and a limited budget, that is gold. |
| dinotrac Oct 09, 2007 4:53 AM EDT |
>I don't see the advantage Mainframe's are wonderful things, but they aren't super-computers. Mainframes have always been about powerful I/O capabilities, distributed across umpteen controllers -- sort of like cluster computing for I/O. Cluster computers can, for some problems, deliver super-computer performance. Otherwise, though, I agree that mainframes make a wonderful answer to many problems that people throw piles of little servers at. |
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