| Re: OT: recommendations for high preformance workstations [message #53987 is a reply to message #53924] |
Wed, 09 May 2007 09:25   |
Rick Towler
Messages: 821
Registered: August 1998
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Senior Member |
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> I am buying my next linux workstation, and other than dollars, are
> there other parameters that I should take into account? My main
> unknown is vendor. Our company likes Dell very much, but I wonder
> whether HP or IBM machines are better engineered or built for
> scientific computations.
Two important considerations are bus topology and bus speed. My
experience with IDL is that it is fairly sensitive to memory bandwidth.
So look for systems with a fast/wide bus.
Intel is still using a shard bus architecture which limits the total
bandwidth available to each processor socket. As socket/core numbers
increase, there is a potential for greater bus contention. AMD is using
a point-to-point protocol (Hyper-transport) that provides each socket
with a dedicated connection to RAM. In theory this scales much better
than Intel's bus architecture but it really depends on the application.
If you are seriously thinking about quad procs or more, you should look
at AMD's Opteron seriously.
I haven't done any testing, but I would purchase an as fast as you can
get dual core system. For Intel that would be a Xeon 3085 or Core2 Duo
E6850. Both at 3Ghz with a 1333 MT/s bus (333 MHz quad rate). With all
of the buzz around Intel's Core architecture I haven't been following
AMD's releases but if I were buying AMD I would consider the fastest
dual-core Opteron 12xx series available.
Don't forget about a decent graphics card. I haven't been following
linux 3d driver development but nVidia has historically had a better
linux driver than ATI (now AMD). nVidia has two lines. The consumer
"Geforce" line and the professional "Quadro". Dollar for dollar, you'll
benefit much more from the higher clock rates and wider memory
interfaces of the GeForce line than you will from the tweaks and driver
optimizations that come with the Quadro line. (What you really pay for
with the quadro line is a card that is certified with a number of
professional modeling and design packages. IDL is not one of them.)
Something like the nVidia 8600-GTS would be a good mid-high-end chip to
go with. Even if you don't do object graphics you should consider a
decent graphics card. There are some features in the upcoming 6.4 that
will be able to take advantage of the hardware even if you aren't using
object graphics.
> I am looking for a 64-bit dual processor (dual or quad core) with
> about 8GB. I will be running Fluent (and IDL) on it, and Fluent can
> take advantage of parallelized architectures. So far I have never
> looked into IDL's features for running on parallel machines.
The above recommendations are based solely on my experience with IDL.
Maybe Fluent thrives on a slightly starved quad core system. And you
can certainly buy a quad or octa processor system, you'll just have a
couple of extra cores for running open office and firefox while IDL is
churning away in the background.
As for Dell, HP, IBM... Everyone is going to have a story. Our shop is
almost exclusively Dell and our hardware failure rate is probably right
in line with the industry norm. In the few cases where hardware has
failed prematurely a replacement was easily and quickly obtained. I'm
talking *hardware* support though. As of today, Dell doesn't support
a desktop linux distro, and I doubt HP does. I think IBM does... But
as JD mentioned there are a number of vendors that specialize in Linux
systems that you may want to look into.
-Rick
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