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

[john at sinodun.org.uk]

> 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?

Yes, very much so.  I'm currently doing test runs at home spread over a 5
machine cluster.  Unfortunately the IT facilities at school are less
sophisticated than I have at home.  (!)

[Snip]
> 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

Currently it's happily bogging down:

    2 x 1GHz Duron
    1 x 1GHz Pentium III
    1 x Twin 450MHz Pentium II
    1 x 700MHz Celeron

and a run takes about 30 minutes to complete.

> 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 :)

I might be able to sell support on the idea of a shiny new server (they do
use Linux a little) which I can then use for CPU grunt.

John
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