[DCN-TechOps] Server Specs (Another Forward)

[Jim Frame]

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:19:08 -0700
From: Bill Broadley <bill at cse.ucdavis.edu>
To: Jon Lee <JLee at ci.davis.ca.us>
Cc: dcn-technical-committee at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 08:58:20AM -0700, Jon Lee wrote:
 >
 >
 > This is the price I would pay for a dell server.

$3,914.61.

This particular machine would have a peak of 4.2 GB/sec (which the
real world being around 1/2) of that, and it is shared so each processor
would have to negotiate for the memory bus and wait if it was already
in use.

I often seen dual intels provide LESS performance than a single processor
because of memory contention issues, in this particular case you are
getting a memory system 2/3rds as fast as a cheap single cpu dell and
sharing it among 2 processors.

The dual opteron using PC2700 memory would have 2 128 wide memory interfaces
at 333 Mhz for a total of 10.6 GB/sec.

With PC3200 it's a total of 12.8 GB/sec.

The dell is also not protected against buffer overflows (if you care).

I've heard that solaris-intel has limited support for hardware is
the Dell PERSC3-DI supported by solaris?

I've had rather bad experiences personall with the dell perc, and in
general I recommend against hardware raid controllers of any type, they
typically cost substantially in performance and if you have have a problem
you have to find another identical (often same revision of the firmware)
raid controller to recover your data.

If you are looking for tier-1, IBM, HP, Sun all sell dual opterons.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis
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