From owner-chemistry@ccl.net Sat Oct  1 14:40:00 2005
From: "Bill Ross ross ~ cgl.ucsf.edu" <owner-chemistry##server.ccl.net>
To: CCL
Subject: CCL: W:hardware for computational chemistry calculations
Message-Id: <-29452-051001141928-9155-LTWGvo9v0EpuGEdDzMOg9g##server.ccl.net>
X-Original-From: Bill Ross <ross^cgl.ucsf.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 11:02:21 -0700 (PDT)


Sent to CCL by: Bill Ross [ross|-|cgl.ucsf.edu]
> With time, for most problems,
> the needle points more and more often towards "get more RAM" than "get
> a faster disk". The obvious exception is stuff where getting things
> onto disk is mandatory (database servers), and where your working set
> is so large (right now past, say, 16G, soon much larger) that it is
> literally not going to be practical to get a machine with that much
> memory. Below that size, you owe it to yourself to do the calculation...

I wonder if it's worth factoring in the power cost - don't know if
disk speed costs more power for the speedup than increased memory.

Bill Ross