From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 23 13:33:39 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from berzerk.gpcc.itd.umich.edu (berzerk.gpcc.itd.umich.edu [141.211.2.162]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6675237B479 for ; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:33:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from stargate.gpcc.itd.umich.edu (smtp@stargate.gpcc.itd.umich.edu [141.211.2.154]) by berzerk.gpcc.itd.umich.edu (8.8.8/4.3-mailhub) with ESMTP id QAA20501; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:33:35 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (timcm@localhost) by stargate.gpcc.itd.umich.edu (8.8.8/5.1-client) with ESMTP id QAA25785; Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:33:34 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:33:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim McMillen X-Sender: timcm@stargate.gpcc.itd.umich.edu To: Allan Strand Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Choosing a fairly high-speed compute server In-Reply-To: <867l6zween.fsf@linum.cofc.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message