On 16 Mar 2005, at 3:46 pm, Rayson Ho wrote: > --- Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote: >> Did you consider an 8-way SGI Altix 350? >> >> It might suit your application well, and might even fit in that >> budget >> (just). > > The IA64/Itanic is not good at integer code, and it is expensive and > sucks lots of power. Opteron is much better and more common IMO. I thought he said it was molecular dynamics code? That would be floating point, wouldn't it? And the power issue is only true up to a point; the good fellows at the Manchester Supercomputing Centre tell me that the large NUMA boxes from SGI that they have are *way* more power-efficient than their IBM Xeon cluster. More expensive up front, yes, but the power consumption and aircon requirements are much friendlier. Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5 860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233