[TriLUG] Recommend some 'big iron'?

[Chris Hedemark]

> Thanks for the link. My expectation is that the jobs will be CPU (and,
> to a lesser extent, RAM) bound, and less IO bound.

In that case the sun E450 will give you very little advantage.  In fact it
will likely seem quite slow.  I had some of these in my care at my last job
and they weren't all they are cracked up to be.

> - Linux (probably debian)
> - PostgreSQL

If performance is of the utmost importance, are you sure you want
PostgreSQL?

> - R
> - Perl
> - Apache (to allow research staff to code texts)
> - MAYBE ClaraOCR, to try to turn scanned documents into text
>
> I'm going to go ahead and propose some fancy, brand-name solution (the
> Sun or IBM probably) with the expectation that I'll probably end up
> cutting it down to a cheaper solution.

Again, I'd avoid the Sun E450.  Disappointment city.  It was considered
slow two years ago.  My benchmarking of CPU intensive applications against
this machine, fully loaded, was pitiful.

At the bottom end an SMP Athlon MP box would be an excellent machine.  It
would be very hard to spend $5,000 on such a workstation.

If you really want RISC hardware check out the Sun Blade 1000 at the bottom
end.  Dual UltraSPARC III processors, 8MB cache per processor, support for
high memory counts (if needed), etc.  A really well spec'd out box would
run you in the neighborhood of $15,000.

A Compaq AlphaStation DS20E is an absolute shredder with dual 833MHz
Alphas.  Two not enough?  The ES40 supports four processors (but only at
667MHz each).