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.
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.