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Date:      Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:33:34 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Tim McMillen <timcm@umich.edu>
To:        Allan Strand <stranda@cofc.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Choosing a fairly high-speed compute server
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.4.10.10010231615480.20641-100000@stargate.gpcc.itd.umich.edu>
In-Reply-To: <867l6zween.fsf@linum.cofc.edu>

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Depending on how parralizable your process is, you might want to look into
creating a cluster. You may be able to do it more cheaply. 
See http://acme.ecn.purdue.edu   They did get lucky with part
availability.
	Also for price / performance the AMD Duron beats the P3 easily.
See www.cpuscorecard.com/cpu_latest.htm   
www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/athlon-09.html
if that link doesn't work look for the cpu guide.
or just search Tom's hardware for Duron.  The FP performance kills the P3,
while most other things are a little behind.

You could create 2 or more boxes using Duron Chips and use them as a
cluster.  The one drawback is that as of august there were no chipsets
for the Duron that could handle ECC memory.  Don't know if that was a
requirement for you.  The ECC supporting chipsets were on the way
supposedly.  Hope that helps
					Tim


On 23 Oct 2000, Allan Strand wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have written a pretty complex simulation in c++.  It seems to work
> pretty well at the moment, but it is too slow for my liking.  I am in
> the process of optimizing the code, but there is a point where that
> will not help speed things up.  The program does lots of memory
> allocation/deallocation and that seems to be it's speed downfall.
> 
> So, I need a new box and I wanted to solicit input on some choices.
> First of all, I really plan to have this box dedicated to
> computational problems only, so I don't really need soundboards, fancy
> monitors, modems, etc.  All that is required is a NIC, >= 256M ram,
> and high cpu+cache+bus performance.  Of course I want to minimize
> price.  The program could probably be threaded at a gross level, so
> SMP might ultimately be an option (even if not threaded?), but I was
> thinking of starting with a 800Mhz PIII machine.  Does this rambling
> make sense?  Can FBSD utilize the PIII features?  Is there a
> hi-performance computation in FBSD FAQ?
> 
> TIA
> 
> a.
> -- 
> Allan Strand
> 
> 
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