[GRASSLIST:2297] Re: Import questions

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:

> Probably. Do your systems use IDE or SCSI drives?  An IDE based system
> has to use CPU resources to access the drives whereas a SCSI system uses
> hardly any CPU.  Despite the 'proclaimed' speed of IDE drives they still
> take system resources to read the data that could be better used to
> process it.

Rod,

  No question.

>    As the data grows your system may have to swap portions to disk.
> Again this takes much more CPU resources on an IDE than a SCSI system.
> Then read it back into memory.  And on and on and on.

  Actually, what I'm planning (and hope to be able to implement toward the
end of this year) is to build a small, rack-mounted system of 1U
twin-Athlon CPU, SCSI drive Beowulf cluster. Probably 8 processors to start.
That will be devoted to GRASS, models and other number crunching. Our
300-333 MHz, PII systems are more than adequate for processing words and
other business needs.

Rich

Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President

                       Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
            2404 SW 22nd Street | Troutdale, OR 97060-1247 | U.S.A.
 + 1 503-667-4517 (voice) | + 1 503-667-8863 (fax) | rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
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