CCL: Need advice on buying a large memory pc

 Sent to CCL by: Igor Filippov [igor.v.filippov(a)gmail.com]
 You can purchase this kind of system from PenguinComputing and it will
 come configured with Linux.
 I can't say for 256Gb but we have purchased 192Gb RAM systems from them
 before. Modern Linux works fine there, no special configuration
 required.
 http://www.penguincomputing.com/Products/RackmountedServers/Relion/Relion1800
 I personally would avoid anything from Dell. Cheap stuff is cheap there
 but anything more sophisticated is rather overpriced.
 If you need something cheaper you can get a 64Gb Sandy Bridge E system
 > from cyberpower. You'd have to install Linux yourself though in that
 case. I got a very nice 64Gb RAM workstation for under $2,500 there.
 http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/CyberPower_X79_Configurator
 Igor
 On Thu, 2012-11-22 at 11:37 +0100, uekstrom{=}gmail.com
 uekstrom{=}gmail.com wrote:
 > Sent to CCL by: "uekstrom.:.gmail.com" [uekstrom.:.gmail.com]
 > Dear all,
 > I want to buy a pc with a lot of memory. I see that HP, Dell etc offer
 > machines that
 > can take up to 256GB memory. I indend to run some sort of Linux on the
 machine,
 > which will mainly be used for correlated calculations. Three questions:
 >
 > Is it worth going for ECC memory? How common are memory errors anyway?
 >
 > Is there any special motherboard I should avoid (for Intel Xeon
 > CPUs)?
 >
 > Does modern Linux run efficiently out of the box with 256 GB memory? I
 > remember there were some patches for extra large pages that were
 > needed in the past, but now I imagine this amount of memory is not so
 > uncommon anymore.
 >
 > Regards,
 > Ulf Ekstrom, University of Oslo>
 >