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Re: $10K Mathematica Machine

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg76925] Re: $10K Mathematica Machine
• From: Urijah Kaplan <uak at sas.upenn.edu>
• Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 05:18:35 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: University of Pennsylvania
• References: <f3gqm6$41g$1@smc.vnet.net>

Your best bet would be a dual-socket quad core Xeon running at 3.0 GHz 
with 8-16GB of ECC memory, with a 64-bit version of Mathematica running on 
a 64-bit OS (like Vista or Windows Server 2003).

A nice example
http://www.apple.com/macpro/intel.html
using boot camp to install Vista might be a good idea, as Mathematica's 
libraries for Windows might be a bit faster and better tested. Shopping 
around for the RAM might save you quite a bit.

Very few Mathematica functions are multi threaded (mostly the Linear 
Algebra stuff I think) so you might want to get gridMathematica (Personal 
Grid Edition maxes out at 4 cores I think.) I assume they will be updating 
it for Mathematica 6 soon.
http://www.wolfram.com/products/gridmathematica/

If you don't think gridMathematica would help you for your kind of 
research, A Dell workstation with a 3 GHz dual core Xeon, and as much RAM 
as you can fit. with a 64 bit OS would be a good choice.

In a few months (July?) AMD will be releasing their next generation of 
processors (Barcelona), which will probably be a bit faster than the Xeons 
until Intel releases their 45 nm processors (Penryn) probably 
December/January.

Hope this helps!

         --Urijah Kaplan


Scott wrote:
> I have $10K to spend on a computer dedicated to running Mathematica.
> I mostly do long number theory computations with lots of very big
> integers and rational numbers.  I seek to do bigger ones faster.
> 
> Your suggestions as to the nature of the best computer configuration
> for this purpose are solicited and greatly appreciated.
> 
> Cheers, Scott
> 
>