New Server Hardware and price quotes, Funding the server
 

Lets figure out what hardware is needed to run the 'new' GIMPS server well. Of course there are many different options and configurations. A separate web server and database server would be ideal, but the cost may be prohibitive.

I think there is little question that we should go with a new server with a good onsite service plan. GIMPS is too large to have much down time! The hardware should be as redundant as possible. Would you agree that a RAID5 (or RAID10,50,...) and Redundant power supplies are essential features?

This is the current server:
[quote="Prime95"]a dual 800Mhz PIII with 36GB fast RAID 5 disks (18GB usable) and 256MB, on a T1 or DS3 (not sure which) with Win2000.[/quote]

1) [b]Rackmount case:[/b] Can we settle on a 2U-4U rackmount box? Are there additional hosting charges for a 4U box? If so, please specify.

2) [b]CPU:[/b] There are two main options for the CPUs: Dual Xeon or Dual Athlon MP [ or if cost is a concern Dual PIII, now up to 1.4GHz; but note that the PIII 1.4 ~ P4 2.4 cost].
What are the benchmarks for the Athlons and Xeons in mySQL? (or what DB are we planning on using?)

[quote="Prime95"]
The principle CPU requirement is to drive the database. The web server runs on the same box for little overhead, but the SQL reports often eat almost 100% CPU for minutes. ... Transactions average 2 to 3/sec for nominal (around the clock average)client load, with spikes of up to several dozen per second. [/quote]

George, what is the average processing time for each transaction?

3) [b]Memory: [/b] I think the current 256MB of RAM in the current server is probably a bottleneck. It is very important to have sufficient RAM to completely cache the DB,

[quote="Prime95"]
RAM makes a big performance difference since SQL Server caches pretty much the entire set of tables and only the write-thrus do I/O (thus reports are mostly CPU/bus bound)[/quote]

How large is the DB and how much RAM would be needed to completely cache it? (room for future growth?)
I think 512Mb is the minimum we should look at. 1GB would be preferred if we have the financial resources.

4) [b]Storage: [/b] How critical is the speed of our storage subsystem? I would say a 3 x 36GB configured in RAID 5 is the minimum option. Better would be with an additional 2x18GB RAID 1 for the OS. 15k or 10k HDs? A caching RAID controller would also be helpful.
A Hot spare for the RAID 5 would limit down time. How long would it take to get personal to the server to replace the HD? If we loose one drive from the RAID 5 array we would not loose data, but until the drive is replaced the array would be several times slower.

5) [b]Service:[/b] A good service agreement is very important. Same Day or Next day service? Dell for example, offers a 3 year Same Day 4Hr response with parts/labor or Next Business day. Then we often have the option of business hrs response or 24/7 response.

I think that covers most of the hardware choices. Are there any other important hardware considerations? Adding an additional NIC for ~$60 would also help the redundancy of the system.

[b]Now we need to discuss these requirements, gets server quotes, and find funding to purchase the server.[/b]

I am not saying we need to purchase the server now, but lets just get the details ready. Then when we need the server all we need to do is purchase it and set it up.

Re: New Server Hardware and price quotes, Funding the server
 

[quote="Angular"]

2) [b]CPU:[/b] There are two main options for the CPUs: Dual Xeon or Dual Athlon MP [ or if cost is a concern Dual PIII, now up to 1.4GHz; but note that the PIII 1.4 ~ P4 2.4 cost].
What are the benchmarks for the Athlons and Xeons in mySQL? (or what DB are we planning on using?)

3) [b]Memory: [/b] I think the current 256MB of RAM in the current server is probably a bottleneck. It is very important to have sufficient RAM to completely cache the DB.

How large is the DB and how much RAM would be needed to completely cache it? (room for future growth?)
I think 512Mb is the minimum we should look at. 1GB would be preferred if we have the financial resources.
[/quote]

2)
I'd prefer Dual Athlon. They perform better than Xeon and PIII in the average work, unless you hand-code each application.

3)
If you use a transactional database, 1GB RAM would be better to cache all the tablespace. If you plan 512, you have to redesign the database control files when upgrading (Oracle docet).

Luigi 8)

In terms of processors, I think we should go with dual Athlon MPs. It is has a much better price/performance ratio (last time I checked) than versus Xeons. If you would like to see the performance, you can look at this article:
[url]http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1641[/url]
If we were going to have this professional hosted (in a colo facility) we should probably go with a 1U case. This would save money because they do charge by the U. Anandtech also has a comparison of a bunch of 1U dual Athlon MP systems here:
[url]http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1695[/url]

In terms of hosting, it would be very expensive to send it to a colo. If we could find someone at a university that would be willing to host it, that would be ideal. Universities have lots of bandwidth and since this is a mathematical project, they should find it a worthy use of bandwidth. Also, if we were hosting in a college, we wouldn't neccessarily need a 1U case, because we wouldn't get charged by the U (hopefully, we wouldn't get charged at all).

For storage, I think SCSI RAID is overkill. Instead I think it should be IDE RAID. This is because SCSI discs are a lot more money than IDE disks and SCSI RAID controllers are really, really expensive (much more so than IDE RAID). Instead, I suggest we go for 1 gig of RAM. Since this would allow the server to cache most, if not all, of the database and since most DB requests are probably read requests (for generating the stats), you wouldn't need to use the hard drives very much.

If we don't have to put it in a 1U case, then we could probably build it cheaper than buying. You mention Dell, but we couldn't use Dell if we went with the Athlon MPs because Dell doesn't do AMD.

In terms of redundant NICs, a few of the Athlon MP motherboards have dual NICs built in. However, if you want ultimate redundancy, then I think proxy servers would be the best idea. Sure, the stats website would go down, but people would still be able to reserve and return exponents, which is the most important.

These are my thoughts,
Andrew

[quote="adpowers"]If we were going to have this professional hosted (in a colo facility) we should probably go with a 1U case. This would save money because they do charge by the U. [/quote]

That is a valid point. The storage subsystem must fit in the 1U case. How many hard drives can a 1U case contain?

[quote]
For storage, I think SCSI RAID is overkill. Instead I think it should be IDE RAID. This is because SCSI discs are a lot more money than IDE disks and SCSI RAID controllers are really, really expensive (much more so than IDE RAID). [/quote]

How do you plain to do IDE RAID 5? They make controllers but are they integrated into any Dual Athlon MB that fit in a 1/2 U case? Or will the IDE Raid PCI card fit into a xU rack case?

RAID 5 is essential. We can not afford to loose data from a HD crash. Recall that most IDE drives only have a 1 year warranty now. [some high end drives have the 3 year warranty] A 5 year warranty is standard on SCSI drives. A 36GB 10,000 rpm SCSI drive is only $160. SCSI has 15k rmp drives. IDE still does not have any 10k rpm drives.

I agree 1GB is Ram is a wise choice.

[quote]
If we don't have to put it in a 1U case, then we could probably build it cheaper than buying. You mention Dell, but we couldn't use Dell if we went with the Athlon MPs because Dell doesn't do AMD.
[/quote]

Yes. I just mentioned there service options.

Since we need service, what are good but cheap Athlon MP rack mount vendors?

Re: New Server Hardware and price quotes, Funding the server
 

[quote="ET_"]
2)
I'd prefer Dual Athlon. They perform better than Xeon and PIII in the average work, unless you hand-code each application.

3)
If you use a transactional database, 1GB RAM would be better to cache all the tablespace. If you plan 512, you have to redesign the database control files when upgrading (Oracle docet).

Luigi 8)[/quote]

I don't mind Athlons, I just want to see some mySQL benchmarks on Xeons with dual channel DDR / RDRAM and Athlon MPs.

Do you need 1GB of _available_ RAM to cache all of the tablespace?

[quote="adpowers"]In terms of processors, I think we should go with dual Athlon MPs. It is has a much better price/performance ratio (last time I checked) than versus Xeons. If you would like to see the performance, you can look at this article:
[url]http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1641[/url][/quote]

Yes I recall that article. I am a bit lerry of their homegrown DB tests. Woud our DB transactions be similar to a Forum?? What DB system are they using? To confirm their results if they use the DB we want to use (mySQL??) are their any other Athon vs. Xeon benchmarks?

[quote]In terms of hosting, it would be very expensive to send it to a colo. If we could find someone at a university that would be willing to host it, that would be ideal. Universities have lots of bandwidth and since this is a mathematical project, they should find it a worthy use of bandwidth. Also, if we were hosting in a college, we wouldn't neccessarily need a 1U case, because we wouldn't get charged by the U (hopefully, we wouldn't get charged at all).[/quote]

I am a student at PSU. I would be happy to present a proposal to the university. What could we offer a unversity? A university would need to see this as a beneficial project. They are after all financially oriented like a business.

[quote]I don't mind Athlons, I just want to see some mySQL benchmarks on Xeons with dual channel DDR / RDRAM and Athlon MPs. [/quote]
That Anandtech article I linked to had comparisons of dual Athlons vs. dual Xeons. The Athlons, even while at much slower speeds. I am not sure if they make dual Xeon boards with RDRAM (at least anymore). I think they have switched over to dual DDR because it provides similar bandwidth with lower latency.

[quote]That is a valid point. The storage subsystem must fit in the 1U case. How many hard drives can a 1U case contain? [/quote]
I have seen up to 4 hot swappable hard drives in a 1U case (IDE or SCSI).

[quote]How do you plain to do IDE RAID 5? They make controllers but are they integrated into any Dual Athlon MB that fit in a 1/2 U case? Or will the IDE Raid PCI card fit into a xU rack case?

RAID 5 is essential. We can not afford to loose data from a HD crash. Recall that most IDE drives only have a 1 year warranty now. [some high end drives have the 3 year warranty] A 5 year warranty is standard on SCSI drives. A 36GB 10,000 rpm SCSI drive is only $160. SCSI has 15k rmp drives. IDE still does not have any 10k rpm drives.[/quote]
For IDE RAID 5, you would probably need to build your own, because I haven't seen any (that I can remember of the top of my head) vendors offer IDE RAID 5. Also, the high end IDE hard drives (like the Western Digital SE drives with 8 megs of cache) like I was thinking of using do have 3 year warranties. I think 15k rpm hard drives are unneccesary and too expensive for our needs. Also, I question our need for RAID 5. What is wrong with RAID 1? We would probably be able to get IDE RAID 1 and RAID 1 still provides redundancy.

[quote]Since we need service, what are good but cheap Athlon MP rack mount vendors?[/quote]
If each part comes with a warranty, then why do we need service? You didn't reply to the idea about proxy servers, because if we had them, then service wouldn't be as critical. Also, the second anandtech article I linked to has like 12 vendors that sell the 1U rackmount servers. You can look through them to find a cheap one.

Andrew

[quote]Yes I recall that article. I am a bit lerry of their homegrown DB tests. Woud our DB transactions be similar to a Forum?? What DB system are they using? To confirm their results if they use the DB we want to use (mySQL??) are their any other Athon vs. Xeon benchmarks?
[/quote]
The Athlons do amazingly well at the forum and ad database, and still really well at the website database. Even if the Athlons did the same for our use as they did in the website DB for anandtech, they would still have a better price/performance ratio than the Xeons. You are right about the database, they don't mention what software they use. However, I still think mySQL would preform better on the Athlons.

As for hosting at a university, maybe we could see if curtisc (the highest ranked user on Prime95) would be willing to host it. He is located at Central Missouri State University:
http://www.math-cs.cmsu.edu/~gimps/
Since they already have it running on hundreds of computers and a website dedicated to it, maybe they would be willing to host it. Plus, universities have tons of bandwidth. What is 58 more megs a day? A single kazaa user could surpass that in like an hour.

Andrew

[quote="adpowers"]As for hosting at a university, maybe we could see if curtisc (the highest ranked user on Prime95) would be willing to host it. [/quote]

An excellent idea. I'll ask him. Saving $100 / month colocation costs would let us invest the savings in a better server.

Re: New Server Hardware and price quotes, Funding the server
 

[quote="Angular"]Do you need 1GB of _available_ RAM to cache all of the tablespace?[/quote]

Well, it obviously depends on the tablespace... :rolleyes:

Luigi

[quote] [quote]How do you plain to do IDE RAID 5? They make controllers but are they integrated into any Dual Athlon MB that fit in a 1/2 U case? Or will the IDE Raid PCI card fit into a xU rack case?
RAID 5 is essential. We can not afford to loose data from a HD crash. ... A 36GB 10,000 rpm SCSI drive is only $160. [/quote]
For IDE RAID 5, you would probably need to build your own, because I haven't seen any (that I can remember of the top of my head) vendors offer IDE RAID 5. ... Also, I question our need for RAID 5. What is wrong with RAID 1? We would probably be able to get IDE RAID 1 and RAID 1 still provides redundancy.[/quote]

Software based RAID 1 is not acceptable. (slow, no real time failover)
Hardware based IDE RAID 1 with hot-swap drive carriers is not too bad if that is the price point we need to hit. 2xWD800JB (3y warranty, 8MB 7200 rpm, 80GB) is only ~$220.

RAID 1 gives us the hot backup drive, but will it give us enough speed? We currently have a RAID 5 configuration.

[i]George,[/i] are you concerned about HD speed given your DB background? Any concerns about the new server having roughly the same speed storage subsystem speed or lower?

[quote][quote]Since we need service, what are good but cheap Athlon MP rack mount vendors?[/quote]
If each part comes with a warranty, then why do we need service? You didn't reply to the idea about proxy servers, because if we had them, then service wouldn't be as critical. [/quote]

What would our response time be to purchase the needed part and get to the server's location to install it?? This could easily be days not sub 4 hrs. Unless you want to purchase the space parts ahead of time and have a automatic notification of 2-3 competent technicians in the local area that donate their services. If it were a university, we need them to guarantee the server's hardware or pay someone to provide at minimum next day parts and labor.

I am not sure that a next business day service agreement would be enough. A failure that occurs late Friday, is not fixed until Monday?? That really hurts GIMPS's rep and could cause people to quit or not join. Can we afford to be down from Friday to Monday?

The idea of proxy servers is a good idea. However, it is a bad idea to design the reliability of your primary server while counting on a backup proxy that does not exist and may or may not happen. I would like to see a redundant server (or a proxy would be all most as good) in a different location. The security of the proxy's could easily be a problem. Let’s get the primary server configuration decided first without depending on proxies.

Is RH Linux the OS of choice?

Is anyone willing to donate money to this project? Could we setup internet donation system or at least a bank account? How much work is it to make GIMPS a non-profit organization?

> 1) Rackmount case Can we settle on a 2U-4U rackmount box? Are there additional hosting charges for a 4U box? If so, please specify.

Most of the co-hosting places I've seen pricing for charge in part for case size - PER "u" unit. This is one reason 1u setups are getting common in recent years.

> 2) CPU There are two main options for the CPUs Dual Xeon or Dual Athlon MP [ or if cost is a concern Dual PIII, now up to 1.4GHz; but note that the PIII 1.4 ~ P4 2.4 cost].

Dual Xenon would be a LOT more expen$ive for little to no more performance. From the sounds of it, dual P-IIIs would be enough for quite a while - but the dual Athlon solution looks to have more "room to expand" inexpen$ively, and starts out fairly-close on cost.

> How do you plain to do IDE RAID 5?

If the OS used is LINUX, RAID5 can be implimented in software. Ditto RAID 0 or RAID 1.
I'm using software RAID 0 on my file server - no special hardware needed.

> Is RH Linux the OS of choice?

Not for me - I'm a LONGtime Slackware person - but whoever is actually running the thing should have the primary input.

9-)

[quote="Angular"][i]George,[/i] are you concerned about HD speed given your DB background? Any concerns about the new server having roughly the same speed storage subsystem speed or lower?[/quote]

I have a database programming background, not a database admin.

In either event, one would hope 1GB of RAM would keep the majority of data in RAM so that disk speed would not be critical. If disk speed becomes important we can always add more disks. Certainly, the server will log all transactions as well as maintain databases. Just putting the logs on one disk and the database on another would reduce our disk speed requirements.

While this is a great thread, do we have the cart before the horse? Don't we want to spec our needs, design the database, then write and test the server code on an ordinary machine first? Then we'll need to write test clients that pummel the server with requests and we'll see what its memory requirements are. By then its mid-2003 and our dual Athlon unit will be half the price.

Even though I did say this might be putting the cart before the horse, a week ago I looked into sample prices. At http://www.racksaver.com/products/RS1100Matrix.asp they had a 1U dual AMD XP SCSI system for $1800. At that price, I don't think purchasing the server will be our problem.

Unfortunately, that listed price of $1800 is only for the basic model. While they say it is SCSI, that means it supports SCSI. The listed price includes only a 40 GB IDE drive. I customized it to what we have been discussing (2 36GB SCSI drives, 1 GB RAM) and the price came out to $2848.

There are two reasons I would think it would be better to build ourselves. First of all, the retailers usually heavily mark-up the prices of the things we are hoping to get a lot of (RAM and HD). For example, Angular listed the price of a 160 GB SCSI hard drive for $160, but rackspace.com sells them (in their systems) for $399! It would also be easier to upgrade in the future (if we discover we need more RAM in the server to support the DB) if we built the server (especially if it wasn't in a 1U case).

Andrew

are we looking to buy all new stuff

im sure we could russle up some parts

like a few spare nics ( to have on hand incase of one failing)

ram might be another thing we could scronge together


the hdd's should be bought new so they match for the raid

but i remember hearing some where that they only offer 1 year warrentys now instead of 3

dont know the if its true or not

Since I am in need of a hosting solution for a school, I have been doing a lot of research. The bandwidth requirements that George gave for the server are very low (George can you doublecheck that this is everything, including serving all web pages and not just the client communication bandwidth, 58MB per day to serve all those reports seems low). It doesn't even appear that the CPU requirements are all that high. George says that at present the reports consume several minutes of 100% CPU, and presumably that is once an hour. The box is currently a dual P3 with 256 megs of memory. It doesn't strike me that the server is really overloaded with this configuration, so I question pumping money into more CPU than is really needed (more memory would be good though). There are a lot of inefficiencies in the current setup that could be wrung out. I noticed that after George added the 79M exponents to PrimeNet, the running time for the summary report went from just over five minutes to over 15. There is definitely some inefficiency there that would likely be easily solved by better database coding.

Given the operating requirements, it doesn't strike me that buying a box and colocating it is the best choice. Even buying one and colocating it for free is questionable. GIMPS needs at most about $30 a month in resources. Buying a $3,000 server instead of being able to pay for 100 months (over 8 years) of service without having to worry about hardware failures isn't a sound decision. I would host GIMPS for free at the drop of a hat if I had a box with the reliability and backup needed. There has got to be a way to piggyback or share with others, otherwise the project is going to be paying for way more than it needs.

Hmm, the Assigned Exponents Report runs several megs all by itself. 58 meg a day can't be the full bandwidth requirements. We need more info.

[quote="adpowers"]As for hosting at a university, maybe we could see if curtisc (the highest ranked user on Prime95) would be willing to host it. He is located at Central Missouri State University[/quote]

Curtisc is willing to host the GIMPS server. I've told him we are still in the early planning stages, so nothing is going to happen right away.

He will need to know what the University would have to provide (bandwidth requirements, a fixed IP address?, reboots?, router support in case of DOS attacks?, etc).

We need to decide if the savings are worth it. A colocation agreement would give us better UPS, support in case of a hardware failure, automatic system backups and restores?, etc.)

No rush on making a decision. Though, I'm sure I've missed some pros and cons that we can debate now.

Fixed IP address is a given. Trying to run a Net Server without one is not practical for a large project.

would getting a new server affect older clients abllity to send & receive WU's

i have a lot of sleeper computers that i no longer have access to but are still running prime

would entropia provide some sort of forwarding services?

How many DOS attacks to you currently get? I know it's pathetic that so many companies and organizations get them as they normally accomplish nothing but a little headache for the admins, but a project like GIMPS isn't likely to piss off TOO many people...

[quote="Prime95"][quote="adpowers"]As for hosting at a university, maybe we could see if curtisc (the highest ranked user on Prime95) would be willing to host it. He is located at Central Missouri State University[/quote]

Curtisc is willing to host the GIMPS server. I've told him we are still in the early planning stages, so nothing is going to happen right away.

He will need to know what the University would have to provide (bandwidth requirements, a fixed IP address?, reboots?, router support in case of DOS attacks?, etc).

We need to decide if the savings are worth it. A colocation agreement would give us better UPS, support in case of a hardware failure, automatic system backups and restores?, etc.)

No rush on making a decision. Though, I'm sure I've missed some pros and cons that we can debate now.[/quote]

If he is willing to host the site, then I think we should accept the offer. I believe we could not get a better place and a more dedicated person to take care of it. If we accept the offer with a slightly lower level of service, we can then invest more in the server(s) themselves to compensate for that.

Alf

The WD special edition drives are still 3 year and have the huge cache to boot. I have found them to be EXCELLENT for IDE raid, being that they have high rotation speeds, densith, and such a large cache. And the 80 gig is dirt cheep right now(at about $140).


The top end of the Maxtor drives also have a 3 year warranty, but use 5400 rpm(large drives), 7200 rpm(smaller densities)and have only the 2 meg cache.

On a database server, Hdd throughput and access times will be the bottleneck. Lots of ram may allow the DB to be cached to ram(if it is small enough)but you still have to write it out to disk often. It will be worth skimping on Processor power to get more Hdd performmance.

Static IP is a must.

Serial console access is very nice too in case you drop to single user mode. Need a secure terminal server of course.

[quote="ebx"]Static IP is a must.

Serial console access is very nice too in case you drop to single user mode. Need a secure terminal server of course.[/quote]

The question about static IP was who obtains it, the University or us? I've never obtained one before so I don't know how that is done.

Serial console access? What is that? Is it a way for remote users to control the server in single user mode? I was wondering how we would do that. Will it let us remotely reboot the machine when it gets stuck? If not, is there another product that will?

There are all kinds of remote administration questions. Will we be able to do remote restores from backups sitting on the Internet? I assume we are backing up the machine over the internet too. Will we be able to remotely install Linux from scratch in case of a disasterous disk crash?

If it were up to me...

http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=77644

I used to have one of these... They seriously rock and they are inexpensive...

If I had a better budget...

http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=77656

This adds SCSI and a larger memory capacity...

Don't let the memory prices freak you out... You can get memory much cheaper for these at Crucial...

Here is some info about LOM...

ftp://192.18.99.138/806-2038/806-2038.pdf

Here are some more links...

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/SunFireV100/SunFireV100.html
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/SunFireV120/SunFireV120.html

Yes, I am a Solaris/Sun bigot...

By January I can afford to purchase another SFV100 that I'd be willing to donate to the cause... My "plan" would be to prototype the new server on my Ultra 1 (Binary compatibility is Sun's forte!) and then transfer this system to the new Sun Fire... Then I'd play with it for a month of two at home to make sure it works, and then ship it off the the IT department at Curtisc's school, so they could mount it in their datacenter... Or, I could host it at my local colo facility...

I don't know much, but I do know how to set up and maintain Solaris on Sun...

If you are curious and have some free time, read this...

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=96509133&m=3100907092&p=1

Yes, it is a long article, but I think you will agree, after reading it, that if I can keep a box running under those circumstances, then I just might have a chance here...

BTW, if you all like this plan, we can begin working on the software and database immediately... My U1 is standing by...

More than likely, the university will have some spare IPs. Since they okeyed the plan, there should not be a problem to get us one.

For serial console access, you first telnet/ssh to a terminal server. From there, there are serial lines to the serial port(COM1: or COM3: ). Some OS allows the serial port to be used as console port so you can do more things remotely.

Reboot machine can be done with any telnet/ssh session. As soon as you enter the reboot command, the session closed. All goes well, you can go back in. If there are problems and the box cant be fully booted, you stuck.

Remote install needs rommon (bios is the more popular term) support I think.

Does Linux allow src code upgrade? That may happen more often than disk crash. We want to avoid taking the host down and sitting at the console to do the upgrade. I dont think Redhat allows that but others may.

One thing though, dont expect a 100% reliable system no matter what you do. The last 1% usually costs 90% of the effort. We should settle with some realistic goals and figure out a way to best recover from disaster.

If going with RAID5 try to avoid a SunOS system. They have dreadful performance hits if a drive does die I learnt from recent experience!

How about donations?
 

Hey guys, I've been crunching primes with George's software for many years now and I really like this distributed computing effort. I've been reading through the server hardware thread with great interest. I'd really like to see this thing move ahead. I think xyzzy has a great idea, . . . a donation. I'm sure there are people in the GIMPS community that would love to see this thing move ahead as well. Hell, I'll be willing to start by donating a dual Athlon motherboard and processors. The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger MP, the processors are Athlon MP 1.2GHz.

http//www.angstrom.com/products/titan64_evaluation.htm


Can someone (George?) look into what there terms would be?

I think Prime95 has a high enough profile that they would at least *think* about providing a free/low cost system to help port to the Clawhammer, in exchange for "fastest Prime machine" rights....

devil

When it comes time to buy hardware, memory, disks and such please let me know and I'll try working some of my vendor contacts to get them to give a deal, donate, bleed to the cause.

Also, just noticed Napster's hardware is going up for auction. These auctions typically see the prices for stuff go for more than what you can buy it new (or "new" used). But, might be able to get something on the cheap.

http://www.dovebid.com/auctions/browsewebcast.asp?AuctionID=1618

circuitcity.com has the 8 MB cache 80 GB WD IDE hard drives for like $90 or so, after rebates. If IDE RAID is the solution we're after, then maybe these drives are part of the puzzle.