Hi,

I plan to buy a workstation for my application on CFD analysis (using Fluent), could any one provide any suggestion on the configuration (Price not above USD 4,000)

I'd like to choose from SGI and Digital, one kind guy emails me that PCs also work well and recommend the forum, ironically, which is one of my bookmark.

also the influence from the number of concurrent users if the machince servered as a server.

any further configuration suggestion is warmly welcome!

Thanks a lot, special to Eric.

Burley

If you don't want to spend more than $4000 you should definitely buy a PC. Best price/performance right now is the AMD Athlon boxes. You could get a 700 MHz Athlon with 512 mb memory and a decent graphics system for $4000.

If you are going to use the machine mainly as a server I would recommend you to run Linux on it. We've got a cluster of Dell OptiPlex PIII 500 Mhz machines running Linux that we use as a compute server. The whole cluster has been extremely stable and runs Fluent very well. However, we have had problems with post-processing from Linux. I'm not sure if these bugs are present if you run a pure Linux system though. We have HP J-class workstations as "desktops" and use the linux boxes as compute servers. With this setup post-processing over X on the HP from Linux is very buggy.

About performance... the 500 MHz PIII machines are as fast as our HP-J2240 machines, which cost us more than 10 times as much as the PC's when we bought them a year ago. A 700 MHz Athlon will be about twice as fast as the 500 MHz PIII, so it should be able to give even the most recent high-end workstations a good match.