[Gllug] Best option for a lot of compute power

[Martin Stevens]

I feel your pain John, 

What are you currently using at school and at what level is the school ?

The school I work at used SIMS NovaT, but then one of the deputy heads
decided that Serco CMIS was a good idea, and the Snake Oil Salesman
promised faithfully that it would work on any SQL database, I installed
it on MySQL and they had used some reserved keywords for some field
names, so grrr, needed MS Sql or and Oracle server, and oracle was way
out of our budget.

You might do better asking the question on the Suse schools mailing
list.

Is this your first time tabling ? Fun isn't it.

Martin

On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 17:27, 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.
> 
> The front runner at the moment is Tablix, which has good support for
> running on a whole LAN-full of machines. Unfortunately, although we have
> hundreds of machines at school they almost all run Windows and Tablix
> hasn't yet been ported to Windows.  (The actual application would be
> pretty easy, but add in all the necessary support services and it
> becomes a bigger task.)
> 
> I am therefore considering putting in a bid for a powerful multi-cpu
> workstation.  The obvious choice seems to be between a couple of
> hyperthreaded processors (giving almost 4 effective processors) or a
> couple of AMD 64 bit processors.  Given that the task is very compute
> intensive (but doesn't require much of anything else - memory or i/o)
> which would be likely to give the better performance?
> 
> TIA,
> John
> (I know - buy one of each and try it.)

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