On Jan 22, 2010, at 2:49 PM, Tom Boothby wrote:
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Simon King
<simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> wrote:
Would it be possible to have a faster disk system in *general* (i.e.,
in the /home part)?
I don't know, I am no hardware expert, perhaps NFS==slow.
But that would be a nice thing to have.
Of course our disk server had other major issues recently, so I don't
know if that's a good measure of how well NFS works. While we're
dreaming, it would be nice if all the machines had a /scratch, and if
we're looking at new ones maybe something better than a usb drive
hanging out of the back (perhaps even local raid).
Actually, for some applications, sage.math isn't the fastest.
Excellent points! I'm definitely in favor of adding a few larger hard
drives to the machines, because I really hate our current setup with
USB drives cluttering up the rack. With regard to speed... there are
faster processors out there, but this comes at the cost of cores. We
could run 16 cores at 3.4GHz, which I could get behind. We could push
this further, and cut down to 8 cores at 3.7GHz, but I don't think
that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
I like the idea of having a box with fewer but faster cores for the
not-as-parallelizeable tasks. 16/3.4GHz seems like a nice compromise.
(What is the speed of a new 24-core setup?) Of course well-used
notebook servers like sagenb.org are very parallelizeable.
By the way, I am -1 to having just two more identical machines. Why
not foster some diversity?
Because the hardware is a *dream* to work with. The design is modular
with captive screws, the rails snap into the rack and slide out
smoothly, the ILOM makes it possible to hard boot / diagnose hardware
from a remote location (we can flash the BIOS from anywhere in the
world!)
I really like being able to switch between machines and use the same
binaries, so that's a reason to reduce hardware diversity.
- Robert
--
To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URL: http://www.sagemath.org
