Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999 08:52:54 -0600
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hello all,
I've been following the list for a couple of months trying to get a feel for
what people are using for hardware and the problems they've encountered, etc.
I'd like to ask for advice/direction on what hardware to purchase for the
following senario:
Here at Fermilab we also are heavily involved providing computing power for
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which produces massive amounts of large (>
250Mb) data sets; the data rate is something like 5Mb/second. They're already
taken care of getting the data off the telescope, onto tapes, and into the
reduction machine (some big iron DEC 16 or 32 processor monster). However,
we're considering using a Quad Xeon Linux box to do some final analysis of the
data. This is what we're thinking of purchasing:
MB - SC450NX
CPU - 4-400MHz Xeons
RAM - 1Gb ECC
HD - 0.5 Tb (11-47Gb Seagate drives in an external rack)
Ether - EEPro 10/100 (onboard, right?)
The SC450NX does not have onboard ethernet. However, there is a short PCI slot
near the processors which works well with an EEPro100 card.
SCSI - Onboard SYM53C896
Kernel - 2.1/2.2
I should mention that we're not worried about backup or RAID.
The things we're concerned about are >500 Gb disk, and the Symbios
controllers. Also, is there an advantage to using the AD450NX over the
SC450NX?
The only real advantages of the AD450NX for Linux are the larger disk drive
capacity (12 Wide Ultra SCSI 1.6in drives versus 6 Wide Ultra-2 1in drives) and
the 5 64bit PCI bus slots. The AD450NX can hold 8GB physical memory versus 4GB
for the SC450NX, but that doesn't help Linux.
This is primarily a CPU intensive machine: once a ~250Mb data set is loaded
it won't unload for a while (.5 or more hours) so I don't think I need to
worry terribly about IO (otherwise we'd consider big iron again: Sun, SGI, or
something).
Does this sound feasible, or should I run straight to my Sun rep?
Thanks, in advance.
It sounds quite feasible. The availability of 47GB drives could be an issue
though.
Leonard
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