At my lab, we're constantly in need of more compute power. More cores and more RAM. Currently we're at around 32GB with 2x4-cores.
The data sets we're running Velvet on require more RAM and other programs, such as BLAST, could do with more cores.
For those of you who buy servers, where from and what to you buy?
I've looked at vendors like <thinkmate.com>. They sell 4x8-core AMDs with 64Gb of RAM for a decent price but I haven't heard of them before or found any reviews. Needless to say, I'm a bit weary about buying from them.
Dell doesn't seem to have what I need. Amazon EC2 doesn't offer instances with more than 23Gb of RAM.
Dell doesn't have what you need? We have a R905, 16 cores, 128GB RAM that serves us quite well. I'm pretty sure you can get them in 4x6 core configurations now. Great machine. May have been superceded by the R910 now, which does have 4x8 configuration and will support 256GB of RAM (unlike the R905 which is limited to 128GB).
We'd avoid HP like the plague, our last purchase (96 cores in 12x8 core blades) has been a complete reliability disaster.
Our Transtec kit is entirely reliable, but I'm not sure it scales as far as you need.
Our last tender went out and Viglen came out top on price/performance for big memory multi-core supplies (admittedly this was with about 40TB of storage) but we haven't installed the kit yet, so I can't give you much of an idea what it's like.
We operate with our HPC centre on Sun (now Oracle) blades, both SPARC and x86. The SPARC machines are 16 cores with 128 threads maximum and 64 Gb of memory, while the Intel-based machines are 8 cores with 24-32 Gb of memory.
The SPARC machines (Victoria Falls cpus) are great, but not very fast; clock is set at 1.3 Ghz, but wonderful for parallel applications including blast. The option of using Solaris might be a little bit on the downside as some apps don't compile that easy. Overall, I would recommend those, but I understand the price is a little bit on the high side.
Dell did have some decent machines but I've had some dodgy experiences with them in the past.