> So I'm asking a few clarifying questions:
>
> 1) Would we have access to all 4 GB (through one or several processes)?
No
> 2) What is the largest memory chunk one process could access?
3Gig virtual with 1 Physical, or 2Gig with 2 Physical, or 1Gig with 3
physical (you should be able to follow the pattern)
> 3) Does WinNT have similar limitations?
Pretty much - its really an intel design property that makes it harder
and less efficient to handle memory configurations that break the
physical_memory + virtual_process_size >4Gig
> this list. Most of all, I don't want to suggest to my advisor that spend
> $27,500 (includes 54 gb HD as well), and find out _afterwards_ that we
> can't use it for our research (large datasets and data mining).
Two things:
1. If your system is parallelisable buy 6 standard PII boxes, some 100Mbit
cards and use PVM/MPI instead of the xeon. This will obviously depend
heavily on your algorithm but if you can get it to scale well parallel
then the beowulf mentality of 'add pc's until its fast enough' will
be useful in the future.
2. If you really want to handle large memory/datasets get a 64bit machine
- eg Alpha(s)
Alan
