Re: [seul-edu] How big a server?

["Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com>]

on Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 05:33:14PM -0500, Jan Hlavacek (jhlavacek@sf.edu) wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I am sure there must be somebody out there who has done something
> similar and can give me some advice: 
> 
> our college has several student labs running NTs. Our department (math)
> is currently the only department that uses Linux, and our usage has been
> so far restricted to a web server running WIMS. We always wanted to make
> some of the excellent unix math software available to our students on
> the desktop. We have a budget proposal for a linux lab, but that will
> take a while to get through (if it ever goes through). 
> 
> Lately, our chemistry department contacted us asking for help setting up
> some sort of unix solution for their students.  One possible solution I
> found is using an x-server on the NT machines in the labs to login to
> one linux server. I managed to get cygwin with xfre86 running over the
> network from a SMB share, and it works beautifully with my desktop linux
> machine. However, to actually be able to use this we will need powerful
> enough server to support many simultaneous connections. And this is wnat
> my question is:
> 
> We may have several hundreds items in passwd file, and as much as 50
> (usually not more than 25, but let's assume two classes working at the
> same time) users logged in at once.  The applications used would be some
> mathematical software (CAS of a sort, octave, maybe kseg or drgenius),
> molecular modelling software and some other computational chemistry
> stuff, so it may be kind of computationally intensive, but i wouldn't
> expect anything outrageus, these are undergraduate students.  Does
> somebody have any estimate about how big machine (memory, CPU) am I
> looking for?  

I'll address the client side, partly to see who else is doing similar
work.

There are a fairly large number of Sun's JavaStations floating around,
they can be picked up for about $30.  There's a HOWTO that goes through
the process of setting these up as X terminals.  17" monitors are
available refurbed for ~$120, throw in a few bucks for a keyboard and
mouse.  This leaves you a sizeable budget for the heavy-lifting server
(or as suggested, Mosix cluster). 

Has anyone out there gone the JavaStation route, and/or do you have
comments on how well this does or doesn't work?

Peace.

-- 
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