Iznogoud - Do you have access to a supercomputer? I had Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) accounts for many years, but not anymore. What are you doing with all the cores? About MPlayer -- your comment is intriguing. How could it change my life? I thought it was just a video/audio player and I normally use VLC instead. I guess I'm missing out on some really nice features. My "file server" is just for the family to access music and video files, so I'm sure I won't be needing a professional consultant, but thanks! ;-) Mike On Sun, Jul 16, 2017 at 1:14 PM, Iznogoud <iznogoud at nobelware.com> wrote: > On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 08:34:26PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: >> >> I don't mind at all! I want one machine to do all of my work which >> includes writing/reading, statistical analysis of fairly large data >> files, video and image processing, web server and file server, so it >> helps to have plenty of cores, lots of memory and speed. What do you >> think? Does that system seem to fit the bill? I just thought a >> better video card woudn't help me. I am doing DVI at 1920x1080 and it >> seems adequate. >> > > Sounds reasonable, and probably adequate, for what you are doing. > > Large files and statistical analysis using that "large" data is subjective, > and it largely depends on the application. But I would say that most people > who do things like this on a workstation are probably easily satisfied with > a bunch of memory (and possibly fast drives). Nothing beats Linux in memory > management right now; this coming anecdotally from me, but most likely true. > > Video editing is demanding. My cousin used to have special hardware to do > all of his editing back in the day. Today, it is not graphics cards that > are pin-pointed bottlenecks as much as it is drives and memory bandwidth. > I envy the patience of those who do video editing. My "control-freak" > character when it comes to manipulating video-data rests on scriptable and/or > interactive use o MPlayer (through a unix pipe). If you are not doing anything > with that piece of magnificent software, certainly invest some time learning > about it. It may change your life. > > For serving files I'd ask my trusted expert "rhayman" to point to solutions. > (The person who opened up for sale two of his 4U rack-mountable units.) The > key is to have robust recovery, in my opinion, but for scratch space for data > manipulation, say large resolution video, you may need SSD or fast RAID or > both. (Alternatively, get a self-improvement book on patience!) > > > In full disclosure, my high computational demands are not easily satisfied with > 1000 cores and 1000 x 1GB of RAM, and I compete for such resources with others. > Bottlenecks for us are large data visualization and what is called "mesh > generation" in engineering and simulation. In both cases graphics hardware and > generous amounts of RAM help. But some of us rest on clever coding and some > quite sophisticated distributed-parallel software packages (HDF5). > > My 1GHz Pentium still satisfies all of my coding and writing/reading needs > and other essential network services! I could probably do all that on a Ras-Pi. > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list