[TriLUG] Recommend some 'big iron'?

[Andrew Perrin]

Okay, this will be fun :)

I'm putting together a research grant for some fairly heavy text crunching
(categorizing thousands of documents using statistical methods). At the
moment the grant is in the "reach for the sky" phase, meaning look for the
best-possible technical solution. Eventually, of course, we will probably
have to cut down.

But for now, I'd like advice on hardware, potentially costing as much as
$25,000 for this project.  I'm open to clustered solutions as well as
single-machine solutions, although I don't want to spend much time keeping
the cluster going.  Things I've thought of include:

- IBM IntelliStation Z line
- Sun Enterprise 450 or 420R
- SGI 2200 or something like that (don't know SGI's line well)
- Building a standard Intel-based system (dual fast processors, 4G RAM,
fast SCSI disks, etc.)

So, what would you do?

ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA