Thank you Suhaib and everybody else answering my questions. Now I pull out old price estimates for IBM systems for prices of memory and graphic adaptors.
I found that * GXT3000P, manufacturer recomended graphic card for data explorer, costs $6500. * Upgrade main merory from 258MB (what we have now) to 1GB costs $8600 * I am not sure about how much video memory do I have now, but I guess this upgrade also is expensive. My question now is then (1) if I were to upgrade this IBM system, where should our money go? Video card? Video memory? Main memory? (2) More importantly, is this price tag worth it? Products for Intel machine, such as nVida and 3Dlabs recommended in response to my earlier posts, seems to cost a couple of hundreds of dollars. Even we throw in a bunch of memory, both main and graphic, shouldn't make price more than $5000, I suppose. Do any of you have experience in both Intel/linux system and RS6000/AIX system and have some opinion? Again, thank you very much for all of you! yosuke kimura On Sat, 13 May 2000, Suhaib Siddiqi wrote: > I have no idea about AIX upgrade you need to talk to IBM tech support > or a slares reppresentative. > > Suhaib > > -----Original Message----- > From: yosuke kimura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [email protected] > Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 23:12:11 -0500 (CDT) > Subject: Re: [opendx-users] Where to spend money to make it faster? > > > > > Dear Suhaib, > > > > Thank you very much for your info. > > > > However, my situation is that we already have a machine (RS6000), and > > we > > want to upgrade some hardware (or software if that is a bottle neck) > > to > > improve performance. I took a look at nVIDA's site, and it seems > > like the > > chip runs only on Intel compatible CPU. Are you aware of similar > > product > > which runs on RS6000? > > > > Also, is 128MB of RAM for the one attached directly to CPU? This is > > less than the RAM of our current system. Does this mean memory is > > not > > that critical for visualization? Our data file is typically tens of > > MB. When we animate it, dx sometimes aborts saying that there is not > > enough memory, so we have to make the size of file smaller by > > selecting > > fewer number of data at each grid cell (our data is multi-valued, up > > to ~30 > > variables). This is another source of frustration. Is there any > > recommendation for this as well? > > > > > > yosuke kimura > > > > > > > > On Fri, 12 May 2000, Suhaib Siddiqi wrote: > > > > > If you want to spend money and get Linux box, you might consider > > > getting a PC with nVidia GeForce2 with 128 MB RAM. nVidia provides > > > hardware accelerated OpenGL and kernel drivers for their GeForce > > family > > > cards. The quality and performance of is excellent. > > > > > > Suhaib > > > > > > ---- > > > > > > -Original Message----- > > > From: yosuke kimura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > To: [email protected] > > > Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 18:09:09 -0500 (CDT) > > > Subject: [opendx-users] Where to spend money to make it faster? > > > > > > > > > > > Dear list members, > > > > > > > > I'd appreciate if you can share some experience with dx. > > > > > > > > We have IBM's RS/6000 43P Model 260 with 256MB RAM. We use data > > > > explorer > > > > to <100 * <100 * <20 rectangular gridded scaler/2d-vector data. > > We > > > > use > > > > 3-D isopleths the most. Our problem is that when we use dx > > > > interactively, > > > > rendering takes long time. So we want to figure out where to > > spend > > > > money > > > > to let the system respond more quickly. > > > > > > > > Our system has 256MB, and graphic card is POWER GXT120P (or 240?) > > > > Graphics > > > > Adapter. We have OpenGL (is this a library or a hardware?), and > > OS > > > > is AIX > > > > 4.3. > > > > > > > > -- > > > > yosuke kimura > > > > Center for Energy and Environmental Resources > > > > The Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA > > > > > > > -- > > yosuke kimura > > Center for Energy and Environmental Resources > > The Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA > -- yosuke kimura Center for Energy and Environmental Resources The Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA
