Machine assignment

People's desktops

List of machines that someone uses as their desktop. Please refrain from running computational jobs on these machines!

Heiko: vision107

Greg: vision112

Eugene: vision119

Ryan: vision104

Ronnie: vision110

Machine Assignment

Click Here for the current assignment of the computational machines to the people in the lab.

New Machine SINGLE CORE Price and Specs:

Price: $ 980.00

Click Here for my suggestion on which machine to buy. 3.4GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 2GB RAM @ 533

Below is the newer Dual Core "Core 2" processors from Intel. I don't think we should go that route as they are 50% more expensive but won't do so well when it's time to share them. 1) People in the lab tend not to like sharing one machine. 2) Even sharing, the performance is not quite that of 2 processors. 3) Even with 4 GB of RAM it is not true that each process gets 2GB - in fact much less and with a high risk of crashing each other. The ultra small form factor and the 3.4GHz + 2MB Cashe + 2GB RAM proposed here for <$1,000 seems to make more sense to me.

New Machine DUAL CORE Price and Specs:

Price: $ 1,445.91

Power: According to reviews etc... this could be some 20%-30% faster that our latest pentium IV 3.4 GHz. It performs particularly well in small matrix manipulation benchmarks because of its fast and large cache memory. It's a Dual Core so it can be thought of as a 2 CPU machine (alike vision309 and vision310, both of which you have experience running concurrently on).

Specs:

Intel™ Core®2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz/1066MHz/2MB L2/Dual-core/VT

4GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS)

CPU Upgrades:

Intel™ Core®2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz/1066MHz/4MB L2/Dual-core/VT [add $638.10]

Intel™ Core®2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz/1066MHz/4MB L2/Dual-core/VT [add $440.10]

Intel™ Core®2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz/1066MHz/2MB L2/Dual-core/VT [add $287.10]

Memory Downgrades/Upgrades:

NOTE: each running process cannot address more than 2GB of memory even on a 4GB machine under Linux. If we could install a 64bit Linux and (The now available) 64 bit Matlab we could have a single matrix that has at the most 2^32 elements (this is limited by matlab) such as a 65,000 x 65,000 array, which would take about 32GB (or 8 bytes per element). This could be useful for some unusually big computation, clustering etc... The price of a 2GB stick of memory is insane for some reason (about $1,000 each). Buying from outside vendors we could probabily (not 100% certain though) get 8GB for a $1,200 total.

2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (2 DIMMS) [subtract $234.00]

8GB, 533MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $4,846.50]

6GB, 533MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $2,281.50]