On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Boatman on the River of Suck wrote:

> That's not what I asked.  8-)  I asked what the TCO and an SP would
> compare like with the TCO of 6 PC's.  I'm pretty sure a z/Series and an SP
> could easily stomp the 6000 PC's.

But in what configuration, and at what cost?

In the case of rendering frames for the visual effects and animation
industry. :-)  We've a relatively small cluster of 300 dual proc 1GHz
PIIIs, with 600GB of RAM spread across the machines.  How much would
600GB of RAM alone cost for a z/Series or an SP?  Probably more than our
render farm did.

It sort of depends on the application and how much inter-machine
communication is required.  In the case of the render farm, there's
none-- except for with the file servers.  In a render farm, it's mostly
a RAM and CPU cycle issue with some concern about I/O throughput to your
fileservers.

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
       "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
              -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943