[daip] What hardware and Linux flavor for AIPS?

[Eric Greisen]

Andrzej Marecki writes:

 > Taking into account that the SUN-sparc based hardware at our site is pretty
 > old and needs to be replaced soon by some state-of-the-art machines (plus
 > given that the support for ARCH=SUL is apparently not that rock-solid as it
 > is for Linux), we plan to move to x86 + Lunix platform.

    Pat Murphy may also answer.  My impression is that SUN has not
been competitive in cost-preformance in some time.

 > 
 > Two strategic questions arise:
 > 
 > 1. What flavor of the processor is recommended for AIPS? Xeon? AMD64? 
 >    Just "plain" Pentium?

      The fastest machines we have tested so far are a 2-cpu, Intel
Xeon 3.06GHz box that we use as compute servers (we have 3)
rack-mounted.  AIPS works on AMD64 and it is perky but gets only about
a 7% benefit (over GNU compiled) from the Intel binaries we provide.
AIPS also works on Macs and can be pretty fast on G5s.  aips++ is
looking at the AMD64 for its vast address space capabilities.  The
Intel competition in that market is pretty pricey.

 > 2. What flavor of Linux is best suited for AIPS? Fedora? Gentoo? Debian? 
 >    Other?

NRAO uses RedHat Enterprise.  So far as I know all of them work okay
for AIPS although Fedora and Debian are more commonly used in addition
to RedHat.

I'm sorry that I can't be more definite.  Cost, system-maintenance
issues, and the like should probably guide both decisions.

Eric Greisen