[Discuss] best dual core Linux box

[feenberg at nber.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

On Sun, 18 Sep 2011, Matt Shields wrote:

> 
> On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
>
>       We are in the midst of licensing the SAS software product for a server.
>       This is an extremely expensive product, and the charge for a quad-core
>       machine is tens of thousands of dollars more than for a dual-core machine.
>       If you are unfamiliar with SAS, it does lots of sequential I/O and is
>       rarely CPU bound. So we are looking to put together a high performance
>       machine that uses only a dual-core processor. I know that dual-core is now
>       usually very low-end (or laptop) but creative suggestions are welcome.
>       Ideally we would like PCI-e slots for SAS or SATA controllers so that we
>       can have a lot of fast local storage.
>
>       Daniel Feenberg
>       NBER
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> 
> I would speak with them about their licensing to get clarification. ?Most licensing is
> based on physical processors, not how many cores you have. ?For example M$ SQL Server
> works this way.

Oh, we have spoken to them. They charge for CPUs, and count hyperthreading 
as additional cores. They do suggest disabling hyperthreading in the bios, 
to avoid the charge, since the hyperthreaded cores don't do much for this 
application.

In answer to a previous message - an SSD would help, but only a little, 
since the I/O burden is entirely large sequential datasets, which are 
faster in an SSD, but not spectacularly so.

Daniel Feenberg

> 
> Matthew Shields
> Owner
> BeanTown Host - Web Hosting, Domain Names, Dedicated Servers, Colocation, Managed
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>