Back when I was in graduate school, workstations from SGI and Sun Microsystems were the primary machines on which my colleagues and I did the majority of our computing, occasionally buying time at supercomputing facilities (SDSC for most of my work). Then the Linux cluster happened, and almost every decent computing facility I knew was doing the bulk of its work on a dedicated cluster or some sort of shared resource. Sun and SGI were going through bad times, while HP and IBM workstations were primarily being used for visualization and small local jobs. However, more recently, I’ve started seeing reports like this one about a powerful workstation from Appro. These x86 workstations contain multiple CPU’s and tons of memory. I wonder if the market for these workstations is growing again. Given the increased number of vendors, it must be. I am curious about the applications that people are running on them (I know of a few, e.g. those sold by my own company), and what kind of thinking is behind purchase decisions. I suspect that memory intensive applications, usually with a large memory footprint are probably the types of applications ideally suited for such machines, while for raw number crunching or distributable applications (e.g. docking), people still prefer clusters.
Is the workstation back?
Picture via Luckybkpk under a Creative Commons license
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