Re: Hardware advice: seeking echoes of running Linux-PC clusters
> Most of these users do stupid non-demanding things like email, netscape, TeX
> and the like. So I think it would pay to move in the direction of cheap PC's
> which can handle those rather dumb actions locally, giving them enough memory
> (>~24Mb) to accomodate one extra Xterm on top of the local PC user. This would
> free the workstations for the more demanding computations at relatively little cost.
In my opinion, if you want to be fair in comparing a linux box to a
workstation, I think 48 MB is where you'd want to be in terms of memory,
if you plan on doing scientific LaTeX/X/Matlab type work. At 48 megs, disk
swapping also stops :)
> But the computer division is hostile to linux (that's why the demand came
> directly from the boss), so I'll have to face sharp critics. I guess the key
> argument against such an approach is the problems of maintaining a park of
> linux PC's: updates (like switching to 1.1...), back-ups, support, etc...
>
> Can any of you provide me some numbers/weapons for this uneven fight? (I'm a
> physicist, they're the informaticians...)
My department was originally not as interested in linux (they had
considered NetBSD though). However, since the time I set a couple boxes
up last year and made them useful to run things like samba (NFS/printing
for windows), arns (appletalk over IP), netatalk (appletalk), apache httpd,
that original opinion formed by the higher-ups is slowly changing. We use
dump (and some dept made automated scripts) to back up all the 300+
machines in our building, including linux.
As for support, this user list is a good example of the kind of knowledge
and support that exists in the debian/linux community, not to mention the
entire linux USENET hierarchy. Granted, there is no official support like
you'd get from SUN or HP. But I think that's easily made up by the linux
community. Of course, in terms of a hardware warranty, you still have
your PC manufacturer's warranty. No one will argue with you in the price
category. :) Software-wise, since we use mostly GNU utilities on all
workstations anyway wherever possible, linux fits right in.
As for performance, the best way to convince them is to set one up and
show your dept how it works. Maybe you can convince your boss to
allocate funds for one 48 meg 133Mhz Pentium machine w/a good 17"
monitor. You'll find that X on linux (at 48 MB) runs noticably
faster than most Sun workstations, and just about as fast as the new Ultras.
For a couple of numbers, we used the make bootstrap of gcc-2.7.2.tar.gz to
do a very rough benchmarking test to get a feel of where linux stood. We
used a script to time how long it took to untar the file and do a make
bootstrap. Then convert this this time into the number cycles that can be
done in a day. Although it's not a true benchmark, it
gives you an general idea of how the workstation performs in real life.
Results:
memory gcc bootstraps per day
Sun SPARCstation 20 model 50 48 19.5
Pentium 133 (Linux) 16 38.2
Sun UltraSparc 1 model 140 64 43.8
Sun UltraSparc 1 model 170E 128 53.0
Pentium 133 (Linux) 48 56.9
Of course this test doesn't really test everything. I'm sure the sun
floating point computation speed is much faster, and so is NFS, at least
on our machines... but for general interactive non-computationally
intensive stuff, a linux box really does well.
My two cents.
Steve
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