[clug] workstation for processing MRI data

[Cameron Patrick]

Nicolas Cherbuin wrote:

> Thanks to those who have responded to my query. It does not look as if I 
> will gain much with a 64 bit machine

You'd be surprised.  My rough memory is that some (internally-developed)
CPU-intensive software we use at work was ~30% running AMD64 Linux than
running i386 Linux, on both Intel and AMD processors.  (We're using
Ubuntu on Athlon 4400s, but the effect should be the same on any
distribution.)  With a couple of odd exceptions like Flashplayer, just
about everything you'd want to run will Just Work on an AMD64.  You can
even run binaries compiled for 32-bit Linux on a 64-bit kernel.

If you're talking about a single application using 4GB of RAM, then you
probably want a 64-bit machine for the extra address space - Linux
doesn't allow more than 3GB per process on i386.

Cameron