Hardware advice: seeking echoes of running Linux-PC clusters
Hi,
The boss of the lab here asked me to give a presentation about my experience
with Linux (how foolish!) in 2 weeks. The problem is the following. We are a
high-energy physics lab, occupying 200 people. There are Sun & HP workstations,
but they tend to be more and more overloaded: e.g., last week one
HP9000-735-96Mhz-100Mb station had 19 users, and would complain for a simple
`ls`...
Most of these users do stupid non-demanding things like email, netscape, TeX
and the like. So I think it would pay to move in the direction of cheap PC's
which can handle those rather dumb actions locally, giving them enough memory
(>~24Mb) to accomodate one extra Xterm on top of the local PC user. This would
free the workstations for the more demanding computations at relatively little cost.
But the computer division is hostile to linux (that's why the demand came
directly from the boss), so I'll have to face sharp critics. I guess the key
argument against such an approach is the problems of maintaining a park of
linux PC's: updates (like switching to 1.1...), back-ups, support, etc...
Can any of you provide me some numbers/weapons for this uneven fight? (I'm a
physicist, they're the informaticians...)
Thanks!
Jean Orloff
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