For anyone doing any type of data crunching or high-end programming, you’ll need a computer that is both fast, efficient, and can handle any forms of multitasking thrown its way. Back in the early days, these types of systems were large, took a team of people to run, and were known simply as “super computers.”
Nowadays, these types of systems can be built for anyone’s home or office. Here are some hardware specs you should consider if you need a system that crunches tons of data.
For anyone doing any insane amount of data crunching that relies heavily on the hardware it’s running on, you’ll need a huge ton of RAM. Famous data crunching companies like Hutch have been known to build systems with large amounts of RAM. In fact, their most recent system was built using 256 GB of RAM! Just think about how powerful but also expensive that is to run. The common household gaming PC boasts between 4 and 8 GB of RAM for top-end games.
Any company or individual needs a server to do this type of processing. Using a network can have its limits in terms of bandwidth and when you think about it, it is much faster to share data across an internal system than it is across a network. Because of this, a powerful server is your best option.
What Type Of Software Is Needed?
When determining how you want your system to be built, you need to also take into consideration the type of software that you’ll be using to do the processing. While there are many open-source graph databases out there for use, they do have their limitations in terms of scale. Because of this, many companies instead decide to have their programmers write up their own engines to do the processing as this will fit with their own project’s needs and it can be adjusted accordingly.
What about Server Farms?
Server farms are a fantastic solution for anyone that needs to crunch millions of bytes of complex data and needs a place to store it. For instance, Weta Digitial, the company behind such popular movies like Lord of the Rings and Avatar, runs all of their data through a 10,000 square foot server farmer. Inside of this center, there are 34 racks composed of 32 machines with 40,000 processors and 104 TB of memory each! That’s some insane processing power.
Hard Drive Space
As you have read above, in order to crunch data, you need tons of hard drive space to store all of this data. Hundreds of TB are normally needed if your company is large enough and a team should be utilized around the clock to maintain and process the data. Just look at a company like Facebook who has over 200 million active users on a daily basis. Their data center has to be huge and their servers must contain ginormous sized custom hard drives to fit everyone’s data and keep it stored efficiently. Don’t underestimate the size of your hard drive when building your system.
What Now?
Now that you know some of the specs to look for, start building your system for data crunching! If you’re a single individual, you won’t necessarily need a gigantic server farm as of yet, but it is important that no matter who you are, you have a large amount of RAM and the best software to ensure that your data processing can run as efficiently as possible.
Author: This article was written by David Nance for the team at www.centernetworks.com. Visit CN in the future to see their great material, including their godaddy promo code; to see this code, go here: http://www.centernetworks.com/godaddy-review/.Read our guidelines to be a Guest Author at TechGau.Org
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