good setup for research environment

[Ch3w33]

I have some grant money to buy a machine for my research -- it's not really important what the research is, but it involves running programs that are very memory- and CPU-intensive and tend to run for hours or days at a time. I'm not interested in spending any money on graphics or sound, but I am trying to figure out if it's worth it for me to get a dual-Xeon machine, rather than a single P4 machine. The benefits to the dual, I realize, would be in situations where I'm running multiple instances of my code at the same time (since my code is not designed to be run in parallel). The P4 will be faster for any single serial task, but is the HT good enough that it would be able to handle 2-3 serial tasks (again, each one being quite memory and CPU intensive) in parallel at a comparable rate to the dual-Xeon?

The reason I'm asking is that dual-processor boards seem to be mainly designed for applications like web servers, where there will be hundreds of small jobs queued at any given time, any one of which takes negligible CPU time - but in a situation where there are 2-4 very large jobs queued, I wonder if the dual processors are worth the extra money, or if in many cases, they will be able to even compete with a single P4.

If anyone has experience using Xeons vs. P4's in their research, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[beatle]

I've never done any research, but HT doesn't provide all of the benefits of SMP. If you want to run 2 tasks (say, encoding a video and playing a video) then HT would offer a slight boost and may not slow down encoding very much. If you load up an HT enabled machine with 2 CPU intensive tasks, both will run slower. With a true SMP rig, both will run at full speed. I'd highly recommend a duallie. There's nothing about them that makes them only suitable for tasks that take a small amount of time. I'd recommend a dual AMD rig over Intel unless you have a lot of money and your research runs much better on a P4. AMD costs less.

 

[heartsurgeon]

if you want the most "bang" for you dollar, get two separate systems..get two cheap, consumer oriented Dell systems..very quiet, reliable, very cheap!! you can get a 2.8 ghz system with 512 meg ram, 80 gig hd for 399.00 i know, because i ordered one. down the line, you could add more "cheap" computational power, and if you have access to some I.T. help (like some students) you could potential cluster your machines. my impression of SMP, dual xeons is that you do not get 2X computational power, because there is system overhead in coordinating tasks between the two processors, plus, a single 2.8 ghz xeon processor alone is going almost cost the same as the entire dell system.

 

[Ch3w33]

What about dual G5's? I have absolutely no experience with those chips, but they have a really good reputation. Has anyone used these for number crunching/simulations?

Thanks again.