[Tfug] number crunching machine recommendation?

[John Gruenenfelder]

Hey all,

Our current workhorse computers in my old office at Steward Obs. are showing a
little age.  More importantly, the motherboards are just plain awful and we've
had no end to problems with them.

I've been asked to spec out a new machine.  The main requirement is that it
have at least 4GB of memory as some of the jobs are quite large.

At present, I'm looking at something along the lines of an Athlon64 X2 (dual
core) 3800 or 4200.  For a motherboard, the Tyan S2865G2NR looks nice.  Newegg
only sells 3 socket 939 motherboards and all are nForce4 with a max of 4GB of
RAM.  While the plan is to only buy 4GB, the ability to go higher would be
nice for the future.

While I do have an Athlon64 at home, I have no experience with any of the dual
core chips nor with this motherboard, hence the call for suggestions and
feedback.

The machine this will replace is a dual Athlon MP 2600, so going to dual core
instead of dual Opteron seems like a good idea.

Also, the easiest way to upgrade the current machine would be to simply
transfer over the whole OS.  Of course, then it will still be 32bit even
though the processor is 64bit.  I've been quite happy with my 64bit Debian at
home, but I have no real numbers to tell me if number crunching applications
will benefit from running in a native 64bit environment.  Can anybody comment
on this?  If there is some advantage, then I'll be sure to reinstall the base
OS to be 64bit when the change is made.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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