[AG-TECH] Best single machine *Linux* hardware setup

[Christoph Willing]

On 28/09/2004, at 1:38 AM, Jeremy Mann wrote:

> John, our AG node has always been Linux based and we are extremely
> pleased with the performance. Its a dual Xeon 3.2 gHz with 2 gigs RAM.
> Motherboard is a Tyan S2668 with onboard gigabit ethernet and
> soundcard. The soundcard works great with the ALSA drivers. Video is a
> G200 MMS quad output. Video capture consists of 3 Hauppage WinTV
> capture cards. Distribution is Slackware 10.
>
> Even with a large AG conference consisting of 50-60 streams, the
> system load is 88% idle.

We've helped build single machine nodes with a similar configuration at 
several institutions now and, as Jeremy says, its hard to put them 
under any stress at all.

Some configuration differences are:
-  they use a single 4-input PCI capture card - 
http://www.icpamerica.com/IVC_200G.php
-  they generally use a dual output AGP bus NVidia Quadro together with 
2 PCI bus NVidia cards (420MX or 5200)

Previous systems have run both AG1 and early AG2 installations on the 
same machine, although that can be a bit messy and AG2.3 is stable 
enough now that you could (should) ditch AG1. The AG1 installation was 
based on
http://www.accessgrid.org/agdp/howto/linux-node.html
and AG2.3 for Slackware 10 is available from 
http://www.ap-accessgrid.org/AG2/

chris


Christoph Willing                        Ph: +61 7 3365 8350
QPSF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland