[Tfug] number crunching machine recommendation?

[Joshua Bernstein]

John,

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Need a cluster? *cheap plug* www.scyld.com and penguincomputing.com *end 
plut*

-Josh

John Gruenenfelder wrote:
> 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.
> 
>