[gmx-users] pentium III vs Pentium IVs

[Lynne E. Bilston]

Hi all,

I'm about to buy a small cluster of machines for running MD calculations 
on. I intend (at this stage) to put linux on them.

I was wondering if people had any benchmark data to compare the pentium IV 
machines to pentium IIIs etc? My systems of interest are quite large 
(lipid/ion channel systems). A colleague uses p4's with RDRAM for 
heavy-duty fluids calculation and if I don't need too much RAM per machine, 
they are quite cheap now. Is 128MB enough?

Or whether I should go with a smaller number of dual processor machines, or 
more single processor machines?

Also, thoughts on various flavours of mpi and linux would be welcome. I 
gather from various discussions here that LAM seems to be less problematic 
than mpi-ch.

Any thoughts welcome!

Cheers,

Lynne
________________________________________________________________________________
Lynne E. Bilston, PhD
Senior Scientist, Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, and
Conjoint Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South 
Wales
Barker St, Randwick, NSW 2031 Australia
Tel: +61-2-9382-7924	Fax: +61-2-9382-2643
________________________________________________________________________________