On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 06:02:36PM -0300, Javier O. Augusto wrote: > Greetings, > > First of all, I know this is _not_ an on-topic question, but I think it > is way much better fitted than all those crappy spams coming down. > Maybe one of you is doing the same research as me and can share some > opinions.. > Well, the fact is that I'm planning to get a new Workstation for one of > our Labs doing computational fluid dynamics stuff. Got two options, a > dual Sun Opteron (I could easyly run Debian on it) *W2100z or a dual Sun > UltraSPARC III (Solaris only) *Blade 2500, same memory (4GiB) and same > storage (2x73GiB U320).
Check spec.org (http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/cfp2000.html). The Blade 2500 at 1.28GHz gets a similar SPECfp score to an Opteron 140 using software from 2003 (one of AMD's earlier AMD64 submissions). And I'd get two SATA disks. I know SCSI's better, but it's not _that_ much better, esp. for a workstation. There's always WD's 10k RPM Raptor drives. A postdoc here recently got a dual Opteron 246 workstation with 6GB of RAM, and two SATA disks (set up with software RAID1 and LVM), and it's been doing very well handling bioinformatics and phylogenetics computations :) > What would be the best 'bang-of-the-buck' for my labs' necessity? > Straight horse power. These days the only question is AMD or Intel (or maybe Mac now that IBM's CPUs are getting up there in speed). UltraSPARC isn't keeping up: http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT042704221446 > PS: Not going after a cluster because of a very tight budget. A cluster of cheap-o Celerons on mobos with integrated video and lan is _very_ cheap. It's not scalable, but 10 600$ machines in low-profile cases sitting in a corner can be useful. (If you've got the admin time and skills to manage hardware that won't PXE boot, so you need floppy disks and etherboot...) -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , des.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
