Memory rank, and Nehalem

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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
yeah dell blows. they are the go-bots of servers. sorry to hear about your arrangement there. It seems like they (purchasing) are doing it all wrong..

was the dell ram that expensive? they'd be forced to eat it (rma it) at no cost both ways due to your purchasing agreements.
 

taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
6
76
thanks for the clarification.. I don't know why I thought you were trying to return dual ranked ram to buy quad ranked (when you want to do the opposite due to the limitation you described).

I am well aware of neweggs online RMA, however it is done by computers, automatically, with minimal human interaction. For what you want, you are better off first calling, getting approval, then making an RMA, or if possible making the RMA via the phone. For standard returns their online RMA is great, with the instant approval and everything, but for such unusual circumstances phone is better.
Although it might pan out well (or the same) anyways.

was the dell ram that expensive? they'd be forced to eat it (rma it) at no cost both ways due to your purchasing agreements.
Ram is the #1 ripoff components when buying computers. with markups in the hundreds of percent. even eating the occasional 15% restocking fee, it still comes out cheaper than buying it from dell. (probably)
 

hymy

Senior member
Oct 12, 1999
535
0
76
Long time no see,

I was thinking about this recently, because I finally left academia and was able to afford to build another computer for myself. That brought back the memories of this old thread. Since I know this is one of the few places where you might find someone who understands these things, I thought I'd let everyone know what happened.

That story came to end recently, as it happens. I understand the machines are still doing scientific work, just productive work. Not what they were built for, which was development of a way to do productive work.

The group actually built another machine with 144 gb of ram using similar hardware with the fastest 6 core nehalem. That was called "the Beast". The original was called BoB (bride of the beast), remade from leftover beast parts.

After years of using them and the beating of heads on a very difficult scientific problem. This paper was finally published

http://www.jamesfolsom.com/img/efm1

There was much scientific interest, but the method was not in reach of alot of scientists who couldn't lie, cheat and steal there way to complete domination of campus computer lab machines. But I exaggerate, as it was all legit, except that one time we caused the buildings file server to reboot because we had 20 simultaneous multi 100 gb file copies going. We were forgiven though. In the end our plan played out masterfully.

Because, there was another group who had been working on improving the computational technique, and optimization of the calculation. When they realized they still couldn't beat our groups technique for raw #'s of EFMs calculated, they took our technique and added it to theirs. This suited our group nicely, because we didn't have the expertise to do anything with underlying computer code.

The solution to the problem, at least for now was recently published.

http://www.jamesfolsom.com/img/efm2

Sadly, there were those who fell along the way, we toast them now. They gave great hope, but never found their way.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/logi...re.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6008870

But anyway, it was all a fitting end for this thread too.