Edward A. Berry wrote:
A colleague is interested in purchasing computers for structural biology.
On the CCP4 wiki Kay reports good results with core i7 940 processor
in Dell desktops. Is i7 still a good choice? is it worth upgrading now
to i7 960 (3.2 GHz vs 2.66, for + $467) or i7 980 (3.33 ghz and more
L2 cache for + $999)?
Any particular Dell model, disk configuration?
Any recommendations for a linux NFS and NIS server that would have
user's home directories and software installs for 20 - 30 linux
and Mac workstations? In a building with 1GHz network.
Any suggestions, success reports, or horror stories would be appreciated.
Ed
Some of the responses are summarized below:
CPU:
No one recommended the bleeding edge processors like i7 960 or 980,
Dave Schuller and Jim Fairman thought i7 940 might already be overkill.
-Schuller recommended i7 8xx series, lower power so less heating, he is going
with i7 860:
"Assuming you want a 4 core CPU, these are your choices:
core i5-750 @2.66 GHz, $200 (core i5 means no hyperthreading)
core i7-860 @2.8 GHz, $279 *****
core i7-875 @2.93 GHz, $349
core i7-870 @2.93 GHz, $579
All of those are rated at 95 Watts, which is much more reasonable.
These CPUs have "Turbo-Boost" which means that if not all the cores are in use, and the
chip is within its thermal envelope, they can actually run faster than the listed speed.
For example, the core i7-860, rated at 2.8 GHz, can actually reach 3.46 GHz under the
right conditions."
-G. Sheldrick: Dell T1500 with 2.8GHz i7-860
-Diederichs: "How cool a CPU runs is strongly influenced by BIOS settings. For
i*
CPUs, you should at least enable "Turbo Boost", "C1E", "Deep C-states"
and probably read some specialized articles about this (check out
http://www.tomshardware.com/s/reviews/i7-bios/?order=Date ). And have
disk controller run in AHCI or RAID mode, not IDE or LEGACY."
-Paul Smith likes Dell's entry level servers such as T110 and up with Quad-core Xeon
processors.
RAM:
greater than 4 GB (this assumes 64-bit OS?)
K. Diederichs: ecc memory (and the server-grade hardware that supports it) for
the
server (For Dell stock machines, this is probably only available with i7-9xx
processors)
Graphics: for the workstation, get nVidia because linux support is better.
Paul Smith- (Quadro, but not the NVS series)
512MB Quadro Nvidia FX580 graphics card
Disk space-
Mark van der Woerd, Jim Fairman and Henry Bellamy recommended NAS (network-attached
storage) rather than a server with nfs-served disks. Apparently these are reasonably
priced and capable of nfs.
User accounts/authentication
? reminded that LDAP is more secure than NIS
Mark vdWoerd mentioned their authentication is handled by a Windows network.
(PDC?)
I'm doing the opposite now, with windows users authenticating to a linux Samba
PDC
which is probably about the level of NT4.0. LDAP and Active Directory would be
more
secure, but we're behind the hospital firewall so that is less of a concern.
