Does anyone have any experience using Digital's (Compaq's) Alpha line of multi processor servers to solve CFD problems? We are considering purchasing one.

I have had entensive experience with the serial 'clone' Alpha workstations running NT, DEC UNIX, and Linux. Their serial performance is out of this world nothing even touches there 'old' 21164 Chip. OK, here is the tricky part. There scalabilty on a shared-distrubuted architecture is limited to about 12 CPUs. BUT, if you didn't know, those chips are used in Cray T3E's (a distributed memory machine). So they scale to 2048 processors. The new 21264 Chip has a spec fp of ~60. So, one chip is equal to about 4 - 6 SGI processors. The first 21264 chips have been realized on alpha servers, and I believe you can get up to 12 processors again. I have heard that the scalibility is good on these machines. The real killer is the 21364 chip, it is suppoesed to have a spec fp of 120. They have designed this chip to scale to 64 processors. This is supposedly due out in the 3 rd quarter.