I was asked to refigure a proposal for new computer hardware at work. The one item that I spent the most time on was a new compute server.
The idea is to get a new server that the students can run code on and such instead of beating the pc's in the lab to death running CFD code, Matlab code, and other CPU/memory intensive tasks.
$16K has been budgeted for this.
The first thought was to get a Sun Blade 2000 to do this. I wasn't sure if that would do it so I moved some numbers around and decided I could get a low end Sun Fire V480 Server (dual Sparc III cpu's). A more costly solution but I would have room for the server to grow.
My second thought was to maybe try a Dell server running linux. I could get 2 Quad Xeon servers for $16K or 3 Dual Xeon servers.
I wasn't sure which would be better. I talked with some friends about it and with the head of my department. I eventually went with the decision to try running the server(s) with linux.
Now I'm waiting to hear back about whether the proposal is accepted or not.
