CCL: Need advice on buying a large memory pc

From: "uekstrom!A!gmail.com" <uekstrom!A!gmail.com>
Subject: CCL: Need advice on buying a large memory pc
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:37:53 +0100

 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