hardware

Guus Jacobs

Hello,

Our cfd-lab is renovating its hardware and planning on buying new hardware efficiently (who isn't). Considering the following given, could you provide some advice:

We generally do large calculations on parallel machines (IBM sp) and thinking of composing a parallel machine of pc's instead of buying a small SGI, because of its economic advantage. Considering the stability of pc's is this a wise idea? Are there other considerations?

Could somebody name (and quantify where possible) the main advantages of workstations over pc's?

How well does windows work in a unix environment and vice versa?

Guus