[GRASSLIST:3174] Re: advice on building a workstation PC for Grass

[Glynn Clements]

Philipp Molzer wrote:

> I'd appreciate any advice on building a new PC, with running Grass in 
> mind.  I am currently using
> AMD Duron Processor
> cpu MHz         : 1294.521
> RAM : 750 MB
> Linux 2.4.20-28.8
> The ram seems to be fine, but the CPU frequently max's out on things 
> such as v.in.shape, r.patch, etc.
> I'd like to stay under $600 for motherboard, CPU, RAM, harddrive, and 
> case.  I know I am being quite vague about what sort of data I'm working 
> with, but I'm sure that people must have opinions about what a dedicated 
> Grass workstation would have in it.

It depends on the nature of the workload. If you are doing simple,
serial-access computations on large amounts of data, disk bandwidth
will be the limiting factor. For computations which involve
random-access, RAM is significant. For intensive computations on small
amounts of data, the CPU speed will be the limiting factor. If you
read certain maps repeatedly, having sufficient RAM to cache them will
improve the situation.

Except in extreme cases where the answer would be obvious, it's almost
impossible to predict which will be the limiting factor. You just have
to observe the behaviour (CPU/memory/disk usage) of an existing
system.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>