Hardware Advice? - F*cking with Clusters

http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh&~ck=mn

Try this; it's Dell's returned/refurbished/scratch&dent computers. They go for about half the price of an identical off-the shelf computer, so for however much cash you want to spend, you can get a much better box. The downside is that there's no customization possible; these are real, existing machines sitting on a shelf somewhere. There's enough computers available I'm sure you could find something close to what you really really want.

I got an XPS with a dual core Intel 2.8 GHz processor, 1 gig RAM, 320 Gig HD, DVD-RW, CD-RW, NVidia GeForce 7300 video card, lots of USB ports etc etc for $560 including tax and shipping. It was a "scratch & dent" machine, but I couldn't find any scratches or dents. I felt kinda jipped.

They all come with a 1 year warranty, but so far mine has been flawless.

We bought Laura an Alienware box a few months ago (~six months after Dell bought them?). It took them something like 6 to 8 weeks to ship the fucker. In the end, I think the problem was that they were backordered on 256M sticks of RAM, so they couldn't build it out to our specs. Eventually, they gave up and put two 512M sticks in it for free. Then I threw them out and put in my own pair of 1G sticks that I was planning to purchase anyway. It was very hard to get any real info about why it hadn't shipped, or I would have told them to send it without memory. Fuckers.


It's also seen a few random crashes, including some overheating. And the svideo out doesn't work. I keep telling her to bug their tech support about it and ask for a better driver, but she hasn't.

However, IMO, all laptop manufacturers suck fat ass, including Apple. They just suck a little less than everyone else, kind of like mutt's slogan.

My feeling is that a hugely powerful machine for number crunching should naturally be a desktop, and a laptop should mostly be a terminal.

Good luck.

My friend had a horrible experience with Alienware. She's one of the commenters on this page. She also set up her own page about it, with the timeline of bad experiences on the left side.

You can try finding some small local store that will build the computer to your specifications. I was too lazy to build my last computer, so I just took the box in, told the guy approximately what I wanted, and the maximum amount I was willing to spend, and he put it together and tested it. He was also pretty helpful about answering my questions (I'm mostly going to use the computer for X. Do I want A or B?). I'd done a little online research before I got lazy, so his answers were mostly confirmation.

I'm not sure, but Civ4 effects are mostly graphics as I understand it, and there's little data analysis number crunching that's going to use your video card (there is some research in that direction however). So as long as your games are graphic intensive rather than processor intensive you might be okay, so long as you have enough memory. Someone with more knowledge of games should correct me if I'm wrong. I never have enough memory; I usually have to set at least a gig of virtual memory (sometimes 2) to keep Matlab from crashing when I'm processing stuff. Thats on the image based stuff however. There have been times I couldn't even manage to run a browser or a simple text editor when Matlab's running. So I'd be more concerned about the memory than the processor.

When I was looking for computers, I was told that the extra cores and the 64 bit part weren't going to help me much because of the limitations of Windows (or maybe the combination of Windows and the software). I went with the 64 bit part anyway, although 32 of the bits aren't used. This was all several years ago, so maybe things have gotten better/more useful since. Over the summer my program was running on a quad core, but we had to multithread the program ourselves to actually take advantage of the fact.

I like the small local store idea: did you do that in MI or Bay Area?

As for the rest, I don't think I'll need to use Windows much, and I'm currently using a 64 bit Debian install at school. Mostly, I want the 64 bit so I can have more than 4 gigs of RAM, because I have the same problem with the computer chugging through Matlab or Weka on big data sets. Ideally, I can just gave 8G of RAM and never need to swap out. The ability to play games concurrently would just be icing :-)

Unfortunately the store was in MI. But you can probably find one similar in the Bay Area. I've seen small local stores all over the place. The guy in Ann Arbor was really reliable and took good care of my mom's computer, so I had a known recomendation.

Yeah, I've been too lazy to dual boot my computer (and I just found out my research work is taking up over 40gigs of space, so I can't put another partition on my current drive for a second OS yet anyway). If you're not using Windows, then you should be fine. The more memory the better of course. That's usually my bottleneck, more so than the processing speed. And the newer versions of Matlab are a lot nicer about memory sharing than the older version.

I got to abuse a quad core opteron(?) over the summer and fall. I don't know the amount of memory it had. But I went from 7-10 seconds/trace in Matlab on a slow Windows computer to ~.02 seconds/trace in C++ on the opteron. The multiple core stuff was good too; 3-4 hours for a day's data single threaded, to 1+ hours for a day's data with 4 threads.

http://www.centralcomputer.com/

There's one in Newark, and they will build to order, or at least they used to.

Dell bought Alienware in March, for what that's worth.

Darlingest friend:

I have just purchased a present for you, and is it very important you do not purchase a second copy for yourself.

I'm going to do my best to not tell you the name of this present, so here are your buying restrictions for the foreseeable future.

DO NOT purchase anything you already have a copy of, even it it is new, improved, and visually remastered copy, until you run it by me first.

DO NOT purchase anything personalized until you run it by me first.

Now.  Please respond to this email and let me know you've received this message.  I will be leaving further messages with your email, voice mail, and husband (who's email address I do not have, coincidentally.  Hope his cell phone number works).

If you really want me to ruin the suprise, I will tell what your present is. Or, I'll just give it you in time for MY birthday. Speaking of which, I know what I want for it. If I ever speak to you on the telephone, I might even tell you what it is.

Later!