Quickly looking for something on Dell, I configured the following for $1500. This is definitely NOT the best price possible for this sort of machine, and I don't necessarily recommend Dell, I just wanted to get a conservative ballpark estimate.
processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q9650 with VT (3.0GHz, 12M, 1333MHz FSB) 2 320 GB harddrives memory: 8GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM, 800MHz, (4DIMM) Shopping around you could probably get a lot closer to $1000. The key thing I think is to get a machine that can be upgraded to at least 8 GB of RAM, even if you don't buy that much initially. Although as Jason pointed out, the memory is relatively cheap once you have a board that can handle it. A barebones quad-core Mac Pro with 3 GB RAM is $2500, but they are very nice machines. The memory is 1066MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, which is a little better than the Dell above, and can be upgraded to 16 GB. You can buy 3rd party memory for the Mac Pro for much, much less than from Apple. -Marshall On Dec 12, 8:58 am, [email protected] wrote: > Dana Ernst wrote: > >>> 8GB RAM and at least 4 cores. Get something that runs Linux well. > > >> How many students are you planning on supporting? (I mean simultaneous > >> Sage sessions, where each worksheet open counts as a Sage session). > > > Initially, I think we would never have more than 25 sessions going at the > > same time. However, I'm hopeful that Sage will get used in more and more > > classes and that this number will increase over the next couple years. > > >> I think I would budget about 80MB of RAM just for each open Sage > >> session. Add another 140MB or so for the Sage server, and another 500MB > >> or so for the operating system. Then add up what you need for WebWork, > >> etc. Then give yourself *plenty* of cushion (memory is relatively > >> cheap---I just looked it up for the Sage server we are setting up at > >> Drake, and for us, it's about $35/GB from Newegg). > > > Ignoring WebWork, etc. and assuming we plan for 25 simultaneous Sage > > sessions, anyone feel like taking a wild guess at how much a server would > > cost to meet Jason's suggested minimum requirements? I'm trying to get a > > sense for what I'm going to have to do to obtain one of these suckers... > > For 25 simultaneous sessions, I'd have a minimum of 3GB of RAM *just* > for Sage (not counting operating system, WebWork, etc.). If you're > running Sage in a virtual machine (which makes it easy to clean things > up if people start getting malicious), then I'd go no less than 4GB for > the machine. 8GB would be a lot more comfortable and would leave room > for growth. > > I think 1000-2000 (plus or minus a million dollars :) would buy a good > server with those requirements. But your IT guy is the expert there. > > For Drake, we found an unused server in the computer science side of the > department. All I have to do is find/buy the RAM for it now. You might > ask around to see if there are any unused servers laying around. > > Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
