4D/310 vs HP 730

[Jeff's Account]

In article <10717 at idunno.Princeton.EDU>, vishy at catinhat.Berkeley.EDU (V. Visweswaran) writes:
|> We are looking for a compute-server for our lab of 5-6 users.  Right now,  we 
|> have narrowed our options to two choices :
|> 
|>  (1)  An HP 9000/730 with 48-64 Mb RAM, 1Gbyte disk space. 
|> 
|>  (2)  A Silicon Graphics 3D/310 server. The salesman for SGI has assured us 
|>         that this would be upgraded to the MIPS R4000 chip when it is released. 
|>        Again, the configuration would be 48-64 MB RAM and about 1 Gbyte of 
|>        disk. (BTW, the 4d/310 is not really a standard product of SGI, but apparently 
|>        they have been offering this route - 4d/310->R4000 - to a number of customers 
|>        recently. 
|> 
|>         (Both configurations cost roughly the same)
|>   
|>         The server (HP or SGI) would be to drive 4-5 X terminals and also act as a file 
|>  server for a couple  of workstations from other vendors (MIPS/DEC).  Since our lab 
|>  is essentially a chemical engineering design lab, we would be running a lot of 
|>  optimization algorithms, which tend to be very floating-point intensive.   At any time, 
|>  we expect some 4-5 big jobs of this type to be running in the background, so 
|>  a primary factor in our choice is that the performance of the server for driving the 
|>  terminals should not degrade too much even when these jobs are running in the 
|>  background.  Moreover, these programs tend to also be I/O intensive, since they
|>  write out large solution files constantly .   
|> 
|>        Another factor that we need to consider is the expandability in terms of upgrades 
|>  to faster CPUs. In the case of the SGI machines, these are inherently built for a 
|>  multiprocessor machine, so it seems like these would be more expandable. In the 
|> case of HP, we are not sure how expensive/easy it would be to upgrade to any newer 
|> (faster?) chips that they might come up with.
|> 
|>          Unfortunately, we have not been able to persuade the HP salesman to give us 
|>  a demo machine,  so there is no way for us to evaluate the machine ourselves. I am 
|>  curious as to whether someone has actually tested these machines in a multi-user 
|>  environment, and if so, which one has the better performance.      
|>  
|>          Thanks in advance for any help in this regard.
|>         
|> 
|> -- 
|> V. Visweswaran
|> --
|> 
|> Bitnet: viswswrn at pucc    	        	|  Department of Chemical Engineering
|> Internet: vishy at catinhat.princeton.edu	|  Princeton University
|> Tel:    (609) 258-6754   	        	|  Princeton, NJ 08544

Apparently someone has been feeding you some bad information because the 
4D/310 product has been on the SGI price list for somewhere around a year.
The upgrade to the R4000 chip is available to anyone buying either a single
CPU or multi-CPU machine.

-- 
Jeff Roberts			jeffr at sgi.com
System Engineer			(313) 478-5446
Silicon Graphics		VM 8504
Farmington MI (Detroit)