Our Department has a plan to purchase a powerful workstation/Server for its postgraduate and research programs I would like to know from members in terms of the latest configuration available among the SUN/Digital/Intel family regarding the best available system/configuration for CFD and Structural Dynamics simulation with a price tag of not more than 10,000 dollars.

Thanks Venkat

Price performance wise: Go for linux clusters with intel processors Assuming you have a code that can run in parallel. Better two cheap PC's than one very expensive workstation (IBM, SUN, DEC, SGI etc). You pay an hugh amount extra to get the latest/fastest processor of a given brand. intel/amd processors come in great numbers so are cheaper. Spend the remaining amount on memory (lots of it). Which is again from the brand names VERY expensive. You only use it for maybe two years before it is totaly obselete

It was all looking good until the last couple of words. If $10k is your budget, a Linux cluster is your only viable option. State-of-the-art proprietary UNIX boxes typically come in at (at least) double that.

You can go for a pentium dual processor. I think you can get 4GB ram (2+2).

There are plenty of options, and the best depends on the code you plan to run. However I'd strongly suggest you look into either of these options:

1) A cluster of single CPU computers if possible. You should be able to get 5-6 computers with 2.8-3.06 GHz processors and 1.5 GB DDR memory, and large hard drives for $10000. If your software lets you run a cluster this will be a great option. The top Intel processor is a faster than the current top AMD processor. But you can go AMD if you want.

2) A few of dual CPU workstations. For $10000 you could just about fit in three dual 2.8 GHz Xeons (533 MHz fsb) and 2GB of DDR memory each. These can also be clustered together, but will run quite nicely separately.

This will far outperform anything that you could get from the proprietary companies (SUN, etc) for $10,000. Plus it is nice to have multiple computers so more than one student can easilly run simulations (or a student can run multiple simulations).