Hi Ed, Yes, the entire core line is great for crystallography setups. As has been mentioned, there are often issues with AMD processors as the occasional binary that is distributed has been compiled with intel CPU optimizations.
I'm particularly fond of Dell's entry level servers with Quad-core Xeon processors. You can get a base T110 unit for $400 with and a fully tricked out model for less than $1000 Be sure to use NVIDIA graphics cards (Quadro, but not the NVS series) as NVIDIA has superior linux support. NFS is built in to the modern kernel distributions and is fully compliant with all other NFS setups (mac, unix, windows, etc.). You don't need to install anything, just configure /etc/exports (server side) and /etc/fstab (client side) correctly and you're set. NIS is still a supported package and can easily be added onto any linux distribution, but other options such as Kerberos and/or LDAP may be more secure up to date. Personally, I would just skip network authentication, mount home areas on NFS shares, and copy login info (/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow) entries from a central machine. Be sure to keep your network behind a firewall. Also, read up on NFS tuning. Getting the most out of network shares can often require asynchronous mounting, eliminating atime modification, and increasing block size from NFS defaults. Also, XFS is preferred to Reiser and possibly ext3 filesystems for NFS export. If you have a lot of users, be sure to set quotas, blah, blah, blah. In short, by Intel (basic Xeons are great), NVIDIA graphics, tune NFS properly, skip NIS, and use a good firewall. Happy Computing! Paul --Paladin Scientific (www.paladinscientific.com) --- On Thu, 6/3/10, Edward A. Berry <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Edward A. Berry <[email protected]> > Subject: [ccp4bb] Recommendations for (linux) crystallography workstation, > server? > To: [email protected] > Date: Thursday, June 3, 2010, 5:08 PM > A colleague is interested in > purchasing computers for structural biology. > > On the CCP4 wiki Kay reports good results with core i7 940 > processor > in Dell desktops. Is i7 still a good choice? is it worth > upgrading now > to i7 960 (3.2 GHz vs 2.66, for + $467) or i7 980 (3.33 ghz > and more > L2 cache for + $999)? > > Any particular Dell model, disk configuration? > > Any recommendations for a linux NFS and NIS server that > would have > user's home directories and software installs for 20 - 30 > linux > and Mac workstations? In a building with 1GHz network. > > Any suggestions, success reports, or horror stories would > be appreciated. > > Ed >
