[Beowulf] visualization machine

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 at 11:02pm, Geoff Jacobs wrote

> Ricardo Reis wrote:
>>
>>  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?
>>
>>  thanks for your time,
>>
>>  Ricardo Reis
>
> No nvidia for me unless they open up driver specs. Open drivers have a
> history of being very, very stable if not as fast. Nvidia does have good
> drivers, but I have definitely seen them experience problems.

For truly high-end 3D, there is (still, unfortunately) really no 
alternative to closed source drivers.  nouveua (for nvidia hardware) isn't 
there yet, and the open source radeon stuff doesn't support any of their 
newer hardware.  Also, AFAIK, neither project supports the professional 
series of cards (Quadro/FireGL).

Touch wood, I've had mostly good experience with the nvidia drivers where 
I've had to use them.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF