[TriLUG] 16+ GB RAM PC advice

[Reginald Reed]

I fully second this recommendation for Opteron.  Myself and several
others at work are running Opteron hardware.  I'm not pushing the
memory like some of the guys using them for hardware simulations, but
we do have many 16 and 32G systems happily running RHEL for x86_64. 
Everyone is quite happy.

--Reggie


On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 00:53:37 -0400, Ed Hill <ed at eh3.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Carlos,
> 
> For large memory systems (>4GB RAM) the Xeons are awful.  Instead, you
> should consider Opterons, Itaniums, or other hardware.  We have a number
> large-memory systems within our network
> 
>   http://acesgrid.org/technical_blueprint.html
> 
> including:
> 
>   + Dell dual-Itaniums w/ 16GB RAM
>   + dual-Opterons: (mostly Tyan 2885 MB w/ 16GB RAM)
>   + an Altix 350 w/ 16 CPUs and 32GB RAM
> 
> and they perform *far* better than the Xeons on predominantly memory-
> bandwidth-limited scientific applications.
> 
> Dual (up to 16GB RAM) and quad (up to 32GB RAM) Opteron systems can be
> purchased and/or assembled for a few thousand dollars and they scale
> *remarkably* well.  I'm very fond of our Opterons.  We see almost linear
> (that is, per-CPU) speed-ups with many applications including our main
> ocean/atmospheric modeling software.  And Linux (we use both Fedora Core
> 2 for x86_64 and RHEL v3 for x86_64) runs quite nicely on the Opterons.
> 
> For more than 32GB RAM, you'll have to look into SGI Altix or other
> high-end hardware.  For truly huge simulations it is often best to get
> time at a center such as:
> 
>   http://www.ncsc.org/
>   http://www.psc.edu/
> 
> rather than trying to buy your own.  As an academic, you can usually get
> grants of computing time on their (often huge) systems quite easily.
> 
> Good luck with your simulations!
> 
> Ed
> 
> --
> Edward H. Hill III, PhD
> office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Rm 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
>              Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
> emails:  eh3 at mit.edu                ed at eh3.com
> URLs:    http://web.mit.edu/eh3/    http://eh3.com/
> phone:   617-253-0098
> fax:     617-253-4464
> 
> 
> 
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