Sun 4 lookalike/thinkalikes

[John Merrill]

My group is interested in purchasing serveral servers to support graduate
student computing needs.  These machines will be used in an environment
very unlike the standard time-shared environment; most, if not all, of our
users are heavily compute-bound.  It is our desire to buy several
compute-powerful, but IO-weak, UNIX systems.  These systems must run
X11R3, but they need not have attached displays.  (In fact, it might be
something of an advantage if they did not.)  We would, if possible, prefer
to have most of the BSD 4.k (1 <= k <= 5) utilities around, although this
is not a necessity.  They must also be relatively inexpensive; we cannot
afford to spend huge amounts.

We are considering the purchase of SparcStation I's with large amounts of
associated RAM and small third party disks to provide compute power.  Are
there other vendors who could provide similar or near-equivalent
performance for less money?  Do the readers of this mailing list think
that there are other sun configurations which can provide roughly
equivalent performance for the dough?  Please E-mail me, and I'll
summarize to the mailing list if there is interest.

John Merrill			|	ARPA:	merrill at bucasb.bu.edu
Graduate Program in		|
  Cognitive and Neural Systems	|
111 Cummington Street		|	
Boston, Mass. 02215		|	Phone:	(617) 353-5765