[Beowulf] SATA II

[Mark Hahn]

> 1-Regarding OS, is "Fedora Core 64bit" a good option for AMD Athlon 64 X2
> 4200+?

sure.  distros are just desktop decoration, and anything recent will 
perform equally well.  you do probably want 64b, but that's not rare.

> 2- Is SATA II HDD compatible with Fedora Core 64bit?

disks don't have compatibility - controllers do.  so it depends on your 
motherboard choice.  but I haven't seen any builtin controllers that 
don't work well.

> 3- Concerning RAM, is "2 GB 800 MHz DDR2" sufficient?

any general answer is wrong.  2G is a huge waste of money for some 
applications, and not nearly enough for others.  you'll pay a noticable 
premium for ddr2/800 as opposed to ddr2/667, though, and might not 
notice the difference (again, depending on your workload).

there is only one general correlations I'll draw: many, many loosely-coupled 
and/or serial jobs have tiny memory footprints (so 2GB is overkill, and since
the cache is effective, higher bandwidth is wasted).

it's hard to say anything useful about tighter-than-loose parallel jobs,
since memory size/intensiveness varies a lot - moreso than for loose/serial,
at least in my experience...

regards, mark hahn.