From owner-chemistry@ccl.net Thu Nov 22 05:40:00 2012
From: "uekstrom{=}gmail.com uekstrom{=}gmail.com" <owner-chemistry[a]server.ccl.net>
To: CCL
Subject: CCL: Need advice on buying a large memory pc
Message-Id: <-47893-121122053759-21012-R5yhVjSN3QD3cGxMFS2cAA[a]server.ccl.net>
X-Original-From: "uekstrom!A!gmail.com" <uekstrom!A!gmail.com>
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Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:37:53 +0100
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Sent to CCL by: "uekstrom.:.gmail.com" [uekstrom.:.gmail.com]
Dear all,
I want to buy a pc with a lot of memory. I see that HP, Dell etc offer
machines that
can take up to 256GB memory. I indend to run some sort of Linux on the machine,
which will mainly be used for correlated calculations. Three questions:

Is it worth going for ECC memory? How common are memory errors anyway?

Is there any special motherboard I should avoid (for Intel Xeon
CPUs)?

Does modern Linux run efficiently out of the box with 256 GB memory? I
remember there were some patches for extra large pages that were
needed in the past, but now I imagine this amount of memory is not so
uncommon anymore.

Regards,
Ulf Ekstrom, University of Oslo