AMBER Archive (2004)

Subject: Re: AMBER: best PC laptop system to run Amber 8

From: Andreas Svrcek-Seiler (svrci_at_tbi.univie.ac.at)
Date: Sun Jul 04 2004 - 07:24:07 CDT

Hi,
> Please advise what PC laptop system(cpu type, cpu speed,
> ram size, Linux brand, etc.) is best to run Amber 8, since
> I am trying to buy a platform soon.
...The faster the better, the more memory, the better :-) Anything with a
fast Pentium4 or Athlon(64) processor will work and outpace slightly older
single processor desktop machines. Athlon64 laptops are *very* fast, but
x86_64 linux distributions (I'm running fedora core 2 x86_64)
seem slightly less developed than their 32 bit cousins and you'd need
some expensive fortran90 capable compiler to compile AMBER for that
machine and make use of the 64 bit architecture (which is not guaranteed
to yield a speedup anyway - in the non-representative cases where I
compared the speedup was significant).

In principle: Most applications of AMBER (and similar)
run for long times and produce lots of heat, not to speak of
huge amounts of data (= hard disk space). So in general I'd not recommend
a laptop as an AMBER workhorse. Desktop machines are cheaper (for the
same performance) and you can add hardware (e.g. extra disks) easily.

If you're sure about choosing a laptop, have a look at
http://www.linux-laptop.net to see on which machines linux can be
installed easily. Then make sure the brand you'd like offers
good support in case of hardware failure. Don't choose the cheapest
extra fast laptop just because it has a Prescott_at_3.4 GHz built in.
As for the distribution: Fedora(-Redhat) is ok, freely available and quite
easy to install.
Have a look at http://www.linuxiso.org to see what's around for free.
Hope that helps,
regards
Andreas

P.S.: Now I've forgotten PentiumM/Dothan laptops. I haven't ever tested
one, but at 2GHz, they might be quite fast too and consume less power.
However, they are more expensive than those mentioned above. 

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              o        (godzilla) 
                       svrci_at_tbi.univie.ac.at
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