[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;299966]Mostly true, but application specific. For example, if we ever tackle RSA-1024, it will require 32 to 64Gbytes of memory PER CORE to do the sieving. i.e. if one has a multi-core processory, one will need (say) 256Gbytes+ of memory to use multiple cores.......[/QUOTE]As you say, application specific.

One specific change to the NFS application could well be multiple cores sharing a common copy of the bulk of the memory. It's not at all obvious to me that machine architectures won't migrate in that direction over the next few years, especially given the hints that GPUs have provided over the past few. We've known for decades how to implement multi-ported memory and, for almost as long, how to put more and more intelligence into the memory controllers to take load off CPUs. What has been lacking, IMAO, is an adequate commercial incentive for such architectures to become mainstream.

Looks like I'm out of luck with my SCSI card. There are sever boards with the PCI-X slot but they support Xeons and not the modern ones. Needless to say this is out of my budget and not interesting from a performance perspective. If I proceed, I'll have to buy a 19160. SAS cards are on PCI express but this does nothing for me since I have LVD disks.

I did a search and came up with riser cards but they typically host PCI express on PCI-X - the reverse of what I need. Anyone hear of a riser card in my direction?

I can get Asus workstation / server boards for about the same price as their "hot rod" overclocking oriented boards. I do notice the server boards have the resources put into PCI express, which I don't plan on using at this time. Are the OC boards reliable? My current board, Asus P5MT, is a server model with no bios options but has been rock solid - 7 years of service, prime95 always on 24/7. Wth windows server 2003, the machine has never crashed and on occasion went 2 years between a boot ...

How much do you have invested in the LVD disks? My strong temptation with such things would be to cast them into the sea and get modern ones - the servers that we bought at the office to replace the last generation with SCSI are getting to the point where the service contract can no longer be renewed, and a modern 2TB Seagate Barracuda significantly beats the sequential read rate of a Cheetah 15K.4 from 2004.

(yes, it seeks faster)

[QUOTE=PageFault;300012]Wth windows server 2003, the machine has never crashed and on occasion went 2 years between a boot ...[/QUOTE]Clearly, it wasn't on the net during those two years. Either that, or you didn't care much for applying security patches. :wink:

IME, a major cause of downtime is erratic power supply. At home I don't have UPS so the systems go down at least once or twice a year regardless of their connectivity and patch levels. In each of my two previous jobs, we lost far more time from government-mandated electrical safety checks than we ever did from crashes or scheduled software maintenance. Bloody Elfin Safety...

Paul

It was on the intarweb all that time, running behind a firewall and otherwise unattended. I was in Africa ...

I regularly checked our team stats to see if it was updating, in the event of an outage my brother had a copy of the key ...