$10K to spend on fast server

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill

I have $10K to spend on a fast server.

- It will run one application in a single process but is multi-threaded
(+100 at any one time).

- It will run under either Win2K or Linux, whichever is faster

- The application doesn't do a massive amount of file IO and does not
use a relational database.

- It will do a lot of TCP/IP - the network card must be super fast

- Transaction speed is VERY important. There are no complex algorithms
but lots of (in-memory) hash table look-ups. I am looking for 2
milliseconds response times (from network-in to network-out).


I am not a hardware expert, so would be grateful if anyone out there
can suggest a suitable machine, or even just individual components
(CPUs, network cards).
 
Bill said:
I have $10K to spend on a fast server.

- It will run one application in a single process but is multi-threaded
(+100 at any one time).

- It will run under either Win2K or Linux, whichever is faster

- The application doesn't do a massive amount of file IO and does not
use a relational database.

- It will do a lot of TCP/IP - the network card must be super fast

- Transaction speed is VERY important. There are no complex algorithms
but lots of (in-memory) hash table look-ups. I am looking for 2
milliseconds response times (from network-in to network-out).


I am not a hardware expert, so would be grateful if anyone out there
can suggest a suitable machine, or even just individual components
(CPUs, network cards).
Click to expand...

Look at the Sun Opteron servers.
 
Look at the Sun Opteron servers.
Click to expand...

I second that. The Sun AMD servers are actually quite reasonably priced
and work well with Linux. We have several here as compute-servers.

Depending on your application you should get a 1-way 2-way or 4-way
server. Because opterons access memory directly, this will
give you lower memory latency.

As to network speed, you can expect something like 400-800Mbit
with a fast GbE card and TCP, if you have larger packets. For
small packets the Interrupt response time pf the PC architecture
becomes a bottleneck.

Arno
 
Many thanks to both of you for your advice. Sun was not an option we'd
previously considered but given that our application is written in
Java, it makes perfect sense.
 
Back
Top