Hi, I have to setup a lab for CFD research (running commercial softwares and my own CFD solvers). However I am not too sure about the hardware, whether to go for SUN Blade 2000 or Pentium dual processor machines. Since at Fluents site, many intel based machines (dual processor) perform better than SUN blade 2000. So as a standalone machine, should I go for $20k SUN machine or a much cheaper Intel machine (DELL 530). Appreciate if anyone can give his comments. I am not talking about clusters . Bye Hraza

We have a bunch of Dell Precision 530 with Linux RedHat 7.2 running Fluent and our in-house CFD code (compiled with AbSoft Fortran). So far we have been very happy with the performance and stability. The latest Sun machines tend to run CFD codes quite slow I think. The only reason to get a Unix machine like Sun is if you need more than 4GB RAM memory.

Tks, this is what i thought myself too. Coming from you , it makes more confident regarding my conclusions. Have you ever compiled your code in SUN fortran compiler and then run the program. Does it make any difference if compiled in Solaris itself? Tks HRAZA

A long time ago we had our in-house code compiled on Sun, but now we only have HPs and SGIs left. I benchmarked a Sun about a year ago and wasn't very impressed then, it did not perform very well with the CFD code I tested. But I'm afraid I'm not the right person to advice you about Sun compilers.

thanx a lot for participating and giving valuable suggestions. Moreover your site is A+. I have been visiting your site probably for the last 5 years (implying long time user). Thanx Dr Hossein raza Hamdani aka hraza

We are currently also in the bussiness of ugrading our hardware (IBM RS/6000 44p model 270). The current status is that the main direction is towards Intel/AMD clusters. They are cheap, robust (use linux!) and scalable. A 4 processor IBM costs the same as a 16 processor AMD cluster. I'm pretty sure the cluster is a lot faster.

so go for the cheap/fast option and buy yourself a cluster (intel/amd depends on your religion in this area)