I agree. Lots of memory helps - I've just upgraded my somewhat old PC by doubling it's memory and performance has improved remarkably.
I use twin 19" monitors at work and am working hard at persuading my wife that we *need* twin monitors at home - it's somewhat of a culture shock to boot up my home PC. The ability to park things on opposite screens or look at wide spreadsheets makes it far easier for me to assimilate data and see the 'big picture'. If you've got room on your desk, I'd even consider 3 screens, 2 for working and one for admin (email, etc). I'd also choose dual-core for throughput and parallel-working efficiency - IMO, other applications will start to make general use of it fairly soon. Hard disk size is less of an issue to me. I tend not to generate huge data sets and most of what I do generate has only a limited interest span and can be readily archived off to DVD or a server. 250 GB is reasonable for everything I want to do. Stuart -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Devon McCormick Sent: 01 February 2007 4:58 PM To: General forum Subject: Re: [Jgeneral] super computer I agree with Raul's list, though I would rank "lots of memory" before "fast memory" as even slow memory is much faster than paging. This assumes that you'll work on problems which are constrained by size of the data as many of mine are. I've found the dual-core very helpful in terms of being able to kick off a long-running, CPU-intensive J task but still being able to use my machine for other things while that task is running. Also, if I write my code to be coarsely parallelizable, I can set the other part of the CPU to work on another part of the same problem, doubling my throughtput (though this may limit my other use of the machine). One non-J-specific thing to look at is dual monitors: for the price of a single large (21'') monitor, you can get two 17'' monitors. Most graphics cards will support two or more monitors. I don't have such a set-up as I am currently constrained to a laptop, but a friend of mine can't stop raving about much easier it is to look at several things together with his 2-monitor set-up. Oh, one final thing - get the largest hard-disk you can afford - I've heard good things about the SATA interface too. On 2/1/07, Miller, Raul D <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Roelof K. Brouwer wrote: > > What are my options for a windows based computer with the main > > critera being fast computing of J code. > > The important characteristics are: > > [1] A fast CPU (currently, J uses only one CPU per process), [2] Fast > memory, [3] Lots of memory > > The relative importance (and implementation details) of these issues > varies with the kinds of computation you wish to carry out. > > (For example, calculations which fit into L1 cache tend to ignore the > characteristics of L2 cache. For example, if you're throwing around > huge amounts of data disk speed and or capacity might be important.) > > Also, I can't speak for planned future versions of J. > > -- > Raul > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
