[Beowulf] Re: visualization machine (Ricardo Reis)

[Steve Cousins]

>  Hi all
>
>  I beg to take advantage of your experience although the topic isn't
> completly cluster thing. I got some money to buy a new machine, at least
> 8Gb and I'm thinking between a 2 x dual core or a 1 x quad (or even 2x
> quads). It must be one machine because it must (urgh) be able to use it's
> 8Gb in serial codes (don't ask). Anyway, I've been experiencing with
> paraview for parallel visualization and was wondering on your opinion
> on... buying a ultra-duper-cool state-of-the-art graphic card (Nvidia) or
> 2 graphic cards?

We've been happy with just a single nVidia 8800GTX (state of the art at 
the time) card in a quad-socket Opteron machine. This machine is capable 
of 128 GB of RAM and two 8800GTX cards although currently we only have 16 
GB of RAM, two CPU's (four cores) and one video card. It has been great at 
showing our ocean model data in 3D with a customized version of Vis5D.

Steve
______________________________________________________________________
  Steve Cousins, Ocean Modeling Group    Email: cousins at umit.maine.edu
  Marine Sciences, 452 Aubert Hall       http://rocky.umeoce.maine.edu
  Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469        Phone: (207) 581-4302