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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Workstations

Workstations are a necessary local resource for the computational scientist. They serve a myriad of functions from desktop publishing, software development, to production scientific computing or capacity computing. Workstation components are essentially the commodity parts that make up both MPPs and SMPs available from the vendor community. Entry level Unix workstations cost less than $10K and high-end models seldom cost more than $50K. They are quite cost effective since the allocation of scientist-to-workstation is usually a few (less than 5) to 1 or better.

Clusters of workstations using tools like P4, MPI, Parasoft Express, PVM, or TCGMSG can enable software development activities for MPP applications. However, at present these systems still fall short in memory bandwidth and in scalability for truly large scale simulations. This trend may change with the advent of low level programmers interfaces for clustering systems being developed by the vendor and research communities. This still requires applications that are latency tolerant both in the memory and communication subsystems.