CCL:Help. Cluster or multiprocessor PC? (fwd)

[William Park]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 04:36:21PM +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Hello,
> In our lab, we are trying to start some theoretical calculations about
> reactivity (mainly the location of transition states) of organic and
> organometallic molecules. We intend to use programs as Gaussian and/or
> GAMESS, and only two or three people are going to submit their jobs to
> the machine. The problem we face is what kind of machine to buy. Whith
> a budget of about 1000 USD we were thinking about a four processor PC,

Hmm... with only $1000, forget about clustering.  Just build one dual
machine with huge RAM, and run the jobs over-night.  Abit, Asus, and
Tyan have dual-P3 motherboards; but, only Tyan has dual-AMD motherboard.

> but some told us that maybe a small cluster would be better.  I would
> really thank any piece of advice on the subject.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPU cluster, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Sc.