Barry, there's a reason
nobody in the HPC cluster/Beowulf
world (that I've ever heard of) uses Sparc hardware at all anymore:
Those folks are very sensitive to cost/performance, and for some years
now Sun hardware has sucked in that regard. Probably since at least
2000, maybe earlier. The same basic effect appears to apply to
everyone running web and database servers as well.
There's also no indication that any of this is going to change soon,
Sun hasn't been putting much money into Sparc development for years
now, etc. In fact, the smart bet is that both the raw performance and
price/permance lead x86 has over Sparc will steadily increase, not
decrease. IBM's Power and PowerPC chips are the dark-horse contender
here (behind AMD and Intel, of course), Sun's Sparc chips aren't even
in the race anymore, and haven't been for years. Most likely they
never will be again, either.
(For massive 64+ CPU SMP boxes, the story might be different, but
that's an entirely different game, and I don't know the score there.
Very few such machines are sold anyway, as they are very
expensive.)
Thus I would be extraordinarily surprised if you can actually show
that Solaris/Sparc gives you a better price/performance ratio than
x86/Linux. But if you can, I'd be interested to hear it.
