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 > >