Before you buy it for your cluster (clusteradmin.net blog)
Unless you run large distributed jobs with lots of communication (in which case you should consider getting a large SMP anyway) I suggest you make price/performance benchmarks of your applications before jumping on the new Itanium.
Perhaps for the same X amount of money you can get way more nodes with slower cpus, but all together they will provide your cluster with higher throughput than a smaller number of nodes with top-shelf IA-64 on board.
-marek
--
clusteradmin.net :: a blog about building and administering clusters