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

[David Tansey <djtansey@bigfoot.com>]

I don't know all the +/-'s of this, but www.ltsp.org might be a good
solution for you with the NT machines as a X-terminal and the linux
machine (cluster) as the server. it works for me with 25 (netscape) users
with a PIII and 5112 MB ram... netscape is a mem hog. it seems your programs
are CPU hogs.. i would say a couple (few) PIII (AMD) SMP mosix-clustered
machinese as your app server.

David 

On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 05:33:14PM -0500, Jan Hlavacek 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?  
> 
> Thank a lot for any suggestions or pointers to information.
> 
> -- 
> Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
> Department of Mathematics                             Jhlavacek@sf.edu
> University of Saint Francis               http://www.sf.edu/jhlavacek/
> 

-- 
huo dao lao, xue dao lao.
Live until you are old,
learn until you are old.

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