Advice on ROMS hardware, ver. 2012

[marcellosekoot]

Hi forum,

I need to get a workstation for running ROMS and I hope that it's been long enough since someone last asked this to revisit the question. I've studied Sacha's posts on this topic and now I want to check my understanding of what makes a good ROMS computer by submitting my candidate for comments!

Our project uses a ROMS grid of 150x185x40 and a timespan that's decadal. The goal for the workstation is to be able to run the OpenMP parallel code on the whole grid but on a subset of the timespan.

The baseline configuration I'm thinking of is a dual processor computer with 2x Intel Xeon X5670 6 core CPUs running at ~3 GHz with 12GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM.

I have two options for pre-built hardware:
1. A linux server based on a Supermicro motherboard (for around $8k)
2. A MacPro '12 core' (for around $10k)
I couldn't find an ASUS equivalent.

I'd like to hear:
1. is this really a good baseline spec?
2. any potential performance pros/cons to getting MacPro hardware?
3. any pros/cons to running linux over darwin (e.g. making the darwin equivalent of a server-optimized kernel?)

Looking forward to learning more about this!
Thanks.

Marcel
Farallon Institute
Petaluma, California.