On Wed, 6 Jan 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'd like to ask for advice/direction on what hardware to purchase
> for the following senario:
>
> Here at Fermilab we also are heavily involved providing computing
> power for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which produces
> massive amounts of large (> 250Mb) data sets; the data rate is
> something like 5Mb/second.
> we're considering using a Quad Xeon Linux box to do some final analysis of the
> data. This is what we're thinking of purchasing:
>
> MB - SC450NX
> CPU - 4-400MHz Xeons
> RAM - 1Gb ECC
> HD - 0.5 Tb (11-47Gb Seagate drives in an external rack)
> Ether - EEPro 10/100 (onboard, right?)
> SCSI - Onboard SYM53C896
> Kernel - 2.1/2.2
Sounds great for medium-sized simulation stuff.
> I should mention that we're not worried about backup or RAID.
Then PC hardware is perfect :)
> The things we're concerned about are >500 Gb disk, and the Symbios
> controllers.
> This is primarily a CPU intensive machine: once a ~250Mb data set
> is loaded it won't unload for a while (.5 or more hours) so I
> don't think I need to worry terribly about IO (otherwise we'd
> consider big iron again: Sun, SGI, or something).
Since you don't worry about I/O too much, the Symbios
controller should be OK. CPU core speed of x86 is also
fine, except when you need to do an awful lot of floating
point magic...
> Does this sound feasible, or should I run straight to my Sun rep?
It depends on the memory bandwidth your simulation needs.
If the task is very very memory intensive there's quite
a chance that the Xeons are just waiting for each other
to get off of the memory bus. In that case it might be
better to go for double-CPU machines or UltraSPARCs...
cheers,
Rik -- If a Microsoft product fails, who do you sue?
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