Questions about i7 motherboards & SSD

[najames]

I might need to build a PC for testing some very heavy number crunching. I'd like to compare a single quad core i7 920 to a 4CPU (single cores @ 1.28Ghz) Sun server.

NO GAMES WILL EVER BE PLAYED ON THIS PC. Are there any uses for the slots listed below other than video cards? All my PCs are purposely built with only one low-end video card, or using onboard video, but there are no core i7 boards with this configuration, and I normally don't pay attention to these types of multi-video slot boards.

Expansion Slots
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1/PCIEX16_2)

1 x PCI Express x8 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8_1)
(The PCIEX16_1, PCIE16_2 and PCIEX8_1 slots support 2-Way/3-Way NVIDIA SLI/ATI CrossFireX technology and conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)

I've looked at server boards briefly. I doubt if any of them overclock at all (my Tyan does not), however I might want to, so I can roughly cross-compare to an upper level 5500 Xeon (2.93GHz).

I've read that SSD drives do not do well in multitasking, is this still the case? I was considering purchasing 2-3 smaller SSDs in RAID0 to use as scratch workspace, but I want to run benchmarks with up to 5 simultaneous programs running. OS will likely be Linux.

 

[aka1nas]

The only other thing you might want a PCI-E slot for would be RAID cards, but even that is going to be overkill.

Regarding the SSDs, putting them behind a RAID controller with dedicated cache usually masks any possible stuttering issues on the cheaper MLC models.

Alternately, if you end up with an app that can utilize CUDA (as it sounds like you have some specialized number-crunching related tasks), than the GPUs are back in play and having a few x16 slots could potentially be handy.

 

[najames]

aka1nas, thanks for the reply.

I migrated programs/data off the mainframe in 2004 onto Sun, now we want to move away from Sun to Dell/Linux. I have 2 goals, I want to see if a single CPU can meet or exceed the processing power of the current Sun server. SAS software is licensed per socket per year, we are also looking to reduce costs. One or two quad cores should be cheaper to license than 4 single cores.

I will not use something like CUDA, it is not something we'd ever use here in production, which I want to simulate **somewhat**. Simpler is better too.

I am running SAS software, which does a lot of sequential I/O, reads data into work space (/saswork), sorts it, manipulates data, forecasts, etc. This data is deleted when the client session ends. When someone connects a new session starts, it opens a new directory in this shared workspace. There is no OS or anything else here, just user scratch space, right now we have 55GB, not enough.

SSDs are a stretch (storage admins here say we won't use them for at least 5 more years), but I think 2 in RAID0 would be fast enough for my demo IF they can handle multiple people reading and writing, not sure if they do? I want to use an onboard Intel ICH10R for the RAID work space if possible. I'm not so concerned about the OS space, maybe a RAID on the stored data space. Data is read from stored space, processed into /saswork, then either sits in /saswork until the user exits or they may write out files back to storage from the work space. Datasets we use are routinely 6GB+.

I have a Q6600 system and have even thought about using it, maybe OC it to about 3GHz for the experiment, but I have other uses for my Q6600 at home though. The core i7 should mimic a new upper level Xeon better, especially if I run it at about 2.93GHz.

I realize this thing is not something normaly seen here, but I thought someone would be up on the uses for the motherboard slots if I need a RAID controller, and perhaps the SSD in RAID0. I'll do some more searching.