On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 14:31, Duzlevski, Ognen wrote: > Hi Dr. Wicks, > > can you elaborate on the price tradeoffs? How many more PCs would you get > for a number of Macs? I am not anti-Mac, just curious to know what is an > actual benefit in even thinking about Macs in a cluster. > Maybe 1.5:1 or even 2:1. And the macs are definately MUCH slower in most situations for computation programs. (The exceptions are notable however- HMMER with the altivec turned on runs rings around most anything). [And yes, I have run benchmarks with our actual data] The macs are nice in that they provide a pretty interface AND most of the stability/network admin abilities of the unix machines. They're grossly annoying because there are still things they either can't do or seem to not want you to do. Right now, we're suggesting the Dell Optiplex GX260's for most everyone, in the small form factor. They are very small, power efficient units that look good (always a factor with faculty) on a desk. Thermal is "good" - better than any athlon, not as good as a larger unit with better internal space. "But But -- I can't put 8 hard drives and 3 cdrws in those!" No, no you can't. 95% of our users don't want to. For the others, we just get the larger cased GX260's. (and pretty much watch them not use the extra spaces) Dual booting proved problematical here - we do nightly patch runs in both the unix machines and now the windows machines, so whichever OS was booted, it was the other OS that needed the critical patch. VMware is more attractive for "dual OS" type situations, and we have one faculty member who swears by cygwin (letting him develop in a "unix like" enviroment under XP). If we make a "mistake" and buy the wrong OS for a particular faculty member, with the dells we just wipe the hard drive and start over with the other OS. If you purchase non-PC's, this isn't an option. We have a number of "clone" (high quality clones, in my opinion, but we do have a number of "ICK" level boxes) systems. They're ok for computational nodes where the loss of a single node is not a disaster. However, we've come to rely on the 3yr part/labor warranty of dell so much we're now requiring that level of warranty on ALL systems, and this markedly reduces the price differences from the clones to the dells. Why? We have 4 technical IT people here and hundreds of faculty, students and staff to support. Our time is worth something. I HATE having to figure out some other companies support policy or worm my way into their RMA setup. Dell is far FAR from perfect -ask any dell support manager and tell him/her Hunter sent you :). But they are fairly consistent. The workstations are nice, and are more powerful. But day in and day out we can get most of what we need from the optiplex line. My one personal exception is laptops. The dell laptops just suck when you sit them down and compare them to an apple or IBM unit. That probably answered no ones question and will just get the workstation/apple/stinkpad people mad at me. Oh well. -- Hunter Matthews Unix / Network Administrator Office: BioScience 145/244 Duke Univ. Biology Department Key: F0F88438 / FFB5 34C0 B350 99A4 BB02 9779 A5DB 8B09 F0F8 8438 Never take candy from strangers. Especially on the internet.