--Apple-Mail-12-840296516 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed > Hi Dr. Wicks, > > can you elaborate on the price tradeoffs? How many more PCs would you > get > for a number of Macs? Sure. Although it's hard to recommend exact solutions without knowing a little more about your needs. Pricing Apples today is easier than it was even a year ago. If I were building a room full of generic machines (say 20 or so) that will be used for light rendering and ad hoc bioinformatics, I might do something like this: 20 eMacs @$699.00 (actual institutional academic pricing will be a bit cheaper than this, in my experience...but this pricing is new, so I don't know how flexible they would be right now). This gets you 20 17" screens and 20 G4 processors. You'll need 20 512GB sticks of RAM@ about $50 each. I would recommend a networked fileserver (single processor Xserve comes with unlimited client licenses) and shared disk space (Xraid) so that anyone could work seamlessly on any machine. I have just bought 4 of the dual 1.33 XServes, and although it would be improper to quote our final price, I can tell you that it was significantly less than you might expect. I also bought 5 Dell Poweredge 1650s for the same heterogenuos compute cluster (which incidentally, Bioteam has done an excellent job deploying). The Dells are underspeced compared to the Apple machines, and although the Apple machines were a bit more expensive than the Dells, after accounting for any feature/performance lag on the older Dells I believe that the Apple machines were the better deal. I look forward to benchmarking to substantiate this WRT performance. Anyway, a well-speced file server with 1.26 TB of dual fiber channel attached storage from Apple Education is under 10 grand. That gets you 20 quality workstations with terabyte+ NAS for under $25,000 USD. Now, some will say that these eMacs are "way too slow" for what you want, and maybe they are. I don't know. But in my experience, they are fast enough for my modest molecular visualization needs. I use raster3d, and molscript and rasmol for publication quality rendering of proteins, and I do that on a portable, so I just don't buy it. It may take 2 minutes on a powerbook and 36 sec on a 3.06 GHz PIV HT, but that is not a big deal, and there is the whole dual boot OS issue and client-side licensing. In the end, workflow and efficiency have a *much* bigger impact on time-on-task than processor speed. I think the only serious potential drawback to the eMac is the 1GB RAM limitation. If the machines are for casual multitasking use, then people may find value in the extras that come with the Mac, like the iApps. Then there are the intangibles like noise. 20 PCs can be pretty loud. The eMac is nearly silent. If the machines are to be used for heavy rendering, I would do it a little differently. I would still use cheaper eMacs, but build out some compute nodes on a rack. The idea being here that unless you need all 20 stations to be rendering simultaneously (which you might for a course, in which case then you might want to go a different route again and do the rendering locally on each machine--in which case you then probably want Xeon-class dual-processor workstations with NAS), you will probably gain performance with a render farm approach. Regards, Stephen Dr. Stephen Wicks, Assistant Professor, Biology. Boston College. 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA. 02467. Phone: 617 552 6851 (office) Fax: 617 552 2011 Office: Rm 468 Higgins Hall e-mail: swicks@bc.edu On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 02:31 PM, Duzlevski, Ognen wrote: > I am not anti-Mac, just curious to know what is an > actual benefit in even thinking about Macs in a cluster. > > Thank you, > Ognen > > On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Stephen Wicks wrote: > >> Hi Chip, >> >> Whenever I see someone considering a Linux/Windows dual boot setup for >> a single job in biology, I recommend that they consider a Macintosh. >> OSX will give you fully supported access to all of the command line or >> X11 apps that you will need (including in your case RasMol, Povray, >> Molscript, raster3d etc.), and still let your users use >> Office/Photoshop etc. at the same time on the same machine and same >> OS. >> Networking and interoperability these days is a non-issue. The only >> caveat right now might be that the G4 towers are fast, but not as fast >> as the top end Intel-based solution. >> >> You wanted options... >> >> Stephen --Apple-Mail-12-840296516 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/enriched; charset=US-ASCII <excerpt><fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>Hi Dr. Wicks, can you elaborate on the price tradeoffs? How many more PCs would you get for a number of Macs? </fontfamily></excerpt><fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param> Sure. Although it's hard to recommend exact solutions without knowing a little more about your needs. Pricing Apples today is easier than it was even a year ago. If I were building a room full of generic machines (say 20 or so) that will be used for light rendering and ad hoc bioinformatics, I might do something like this: 20 eMacs @$699.00 (actual institutional academic pricing will be a bit cheaper than this, in my experience...but this pricing is new, so I don't know how flexible they would be right now). This gets you 20 17" screens and 20 G4 processors. You'll need 20 512GB sticks of RAM@ about $50 each. I would recommend a networked fileserver (single processor Xserve comes with unlimited client licenses) and shared disk space (Xraid) so that anyone could work seamlessly on any machine. I have just bought 4 of the dual 1.33 XServes, and although it would be improper to quote our final price, I can tell you that it was significantly less than you might expect. I also bought 5 Dell Poweredge 1650s for the same heterogenuos compute cluster (which incidentally, Bioteam has done an excellent job deploying). The Dells are underspeced compared to the Apple machines, and although the Apple machines were a bit more expensive than the Dells, after accounting for any feature/performance lag on the older Dells I believe that the Apple machines were the better deal. I look forward to benchmarking to substantiate this WRT performance. Anyway, a well-speced file server with 1.26 TB of dual fiber channel attached storage from Apple Education is under 10 grand. That gets you 20 quality workstations with terabyte+ NAS for under $25,000 USD. Now, some will say that these eMacs are "way too slow" for what you want, and maybe they are. I don't know. But in my experience, they are fast enough for my modest molecular visualization needs. I use raster3d, and molscript and rasmol for publication quality rendering of proteins, and I do that on a portable, so I just don't buy it. It may take 2 minutes on a powerbook and 36 sec on a 3.06 GHz PIV HT, but that is not a big deal, and there is the whole dual boot OS issue and client-side licensing. In the end, workflow and efficiency have a *much* bigger impact on time-on-task than processor speed. I think the only serious potential drawback to the eMac is the 1GB RAM limitation. If the machines are for casual multitasking use, then people may find value in the extras that come with the Mac, like the iApps. Then there are the intangibles like noise. 20 PCs can be pretty loud. The eMac is nearly silent. If the machines are to be used for heavy rendering, I would do it a little differently. I would still use cheaper eMacs, but build out some compute nodes on a rack. The idea being here that unless you need all 20 stations to be rendering simultaneously (which you might for a course, in which case then you might want to go a different route again and do the rendering locally on each machine--in which case you then probably want Xeon-class dual-processor workstations with NAS), you will probably gain performance with a render farm approach. Regards, Stephen </fontfamily><fontfamily><param>Helvetica</param>Dr. Stephen Wicks, Assistant Professor, Biology. Boston College. 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA. 02467. Phone: 617 552 6851 (office) Fax: 617 552 2011 Office: Rm 468 Higgins Hall e-mail: swicks@bc.edu </fontfamily><fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param> </fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>On</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>Thursday,</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>April</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>10,</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>2003,</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>at</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>02</fontfamily>:<fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>31</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>PM,</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>Duzlevski,</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>Ognen</fontfamily> <fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param>wrote</fontfamily>: <excerpt><fontfamily><param>Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro</param> I am not anti-Mac, just curious to know what is an actual benefit in even thinking about Macs in a cluster. Thank you, Ognen On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Stephen Wicks wrote: <excerpt>Hi Chip, Whenever I see someone considering a Linux/Windows dual boot setup for a single job in biology, I recommend that they consider a Macintosh. OSX will give you fully supported access to all of the command line or X11 apps that you will need (including in your case RasMol, Povray, Molscript, raster3d etc.), and still let your users use Office/Photoshop etc. at the same time on the same machine and same OS. Networking and interoperability these days is a non-issue. The only caveat right now might be that the G4 towers are fast, but not as fast as the top end Intel-based solution. You wanted options... Stephen </excerpt></fontfamily></excerpt> --Apple-Mail-12-840296516--