[Bioclusters] requesting help for computational server setup (PE 4600)

[karthik viswanathan]

We have a PowerEdge 4600 server running RedHat 9. The system spec is given below.

Server Specs:

Dell PowerEdge 4600
Intel Xeon 2800 MHz Processor
4096 MB ECC DDR Ram
512 Cache
2 x 146 GB SCSI hard disks (RAID 0)
OS : RedHat 9 (kernel 2.4.20-8), file system - ext3

The main usage of this server is for bioinformatics computational work. Clients
run search/match C or C++ programs on this server through protocols like ssh.
The no of clients will be not more than 4. This server is also acting as a file
server for the same clients. T Get 3 newhe performance is not satisfactory so we
are planning to do some modification in the configuration. One of our plan is
promote a client workstation(dell precision-340, 1.5 GHz & 1GB ram) to a file
server and switch the two SCSI hard disk from the PowerEdge server to this
workstation. Add 3 new SCSI hard disk (37 GB) to the PowerEdge server and set a
RAID 0, if possible also add a second identical processor to the server.

We are interested to know if this will improve the performance of the
computational server. Also it would be helpful if you could suggest any other
alternatives for improving the computational performance for bioinformatics
work. If any of you have poweredge 4600 please share your experience and ur
system configuration. Suggestions on disk partitioning, kernel and file system
to use will also be helpful

Thanks for your time and help
Karthik


PS: We are more interested to improve the computational power than file handling!