SPAM-MID [Gllug] Best option for a lot of compute power

[Russell Howe]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 05:27:12PM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> I'm looking into software for the production of school timetables.  All
> the approaches seem to have one thing in common - they needs lots of
> compute power.

> I am therefore considering putting in a bid for a powerful multi-cpu
> workstation.

Are any of these timetabling applications concurrent? I have two dual
CPU machines and it helps for a lot of things, but if you are buying a
machine to handle a single CPU-intensive operation, using a single
threaded process, then you might find that one CPU spends most of its
time idle.

Of course, that idle CPU could then be used to allow you to continue
using the machine normally, although I'd be suprised if a plain
number-crunching application could even bog down a single CPU machine
(assuming you didn't run out of RAM or something) when using a
moderately recent operating system

If the application is console or X-based, then you could put a bid in
for two machines instead, one being headless. Call it a low-end server,
and it might appear to be more of a bargain to the budget people :)

-- 
Russell Howe     | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at wiss.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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