4D/310 vs HP 730

[V. Visweswaran]

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
--

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