VMD-L Mailing List

From: Sabuj Pattanayek (sabuj.pattanayek_at_Vanderbilt.Edu)
Date: Wed Apr 06 2005 - 15:39:19 CDT

Hi,

Karsten Suhre wrote:
> Ideally, I would be looking for a 4-processor board, but it seems there is
> no such with AGP or PCI-Express support (correct?).

You can get 4 cpu opteron (pogolinux, tyan, arima, hpc systems)
racks/boards or 8 cpu opteron racks (pogolinux, arima, armari, hpc
systems, etc) all with pci-x slots (64 bit pci this is not pci-express).

The pci-x slots can be used with *multiple* nvidia quadro 600 pci cards
which have stereo support (since pci-x slots are backwards compatible
with pci). You can compare its specviewperf pro-e/ugs/3dsmax
specifications / performance with other nvidia quadro video cards on
their website.

I've never seen or heard of anyone using such a configuration for a
visualization machine but it doesn't mean it can't be done.

> How about the processor - is a 64-bit Opteron a good choice? Or would you
> stick to 32 bit for compatibility reasons?

You can always use a 32 bit chroot for linux applications that are
distributed in binary only format and that don't run in a 64-bit
environment.

Hope that helps,
Sabuj Pattanayek