Best Computer Of The Year

Two additional SATA interfaces are on the motherboard. One was used for the Lite-On Blu-ray drive, which can handle Blu-ray media in addition to DVD and CD media. We were more interested in the drive for its storage capacity because movie playback requires video support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). Our HDTV could handle its part, but the FireGL board is not designed for this kind of application.

Hooking up the Lite-On Blu-ray drive via SATA cabling was easier than the conventional IDE interface to a DVD drive since there are no jumpers and the cable is smaller. High-def and high-capacity drives like this likely will be the turning point for SATA interfaces on optical drives. There are a few DVD drives, but most remain IDE devices.

The drives were mounted in internal drive bays instead of external drive bays, which tend to be more useful in a file server (see "Building A SAS RAID File Server," ED Online 12386). After a boot test, the hardware was ready for some software.

Program It
Dual booting and virtual-machine support are ideal for a system of this magnitude. Likewise, programmers and developers likely will use some heavy-hitting software. Our system boots Microsoft Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu 7.10. Both support virtual-machine managers and can run each other, though it is best not to run the boot images. Instead, just install another copy on a virtual disk.

The other two pieces of software we looked at this year include Intel's Thread Building Blocks (see "Threads Make The Move To Open Source," ED Online 16538) and National Instruments' LabView (see "Multicore LabView," ED Online 16615). Both target multiple-core platforms like this. Also, both require some programming input, and they tend to address different applications and programmers. Thread Building Blocks works well for number crunching, while LabView's command and control are extremely useful, especially when soft GUI interfaces are required.

Multicore systems are going to raise the bar for memory and hard-disk space. They likely will push network throughput as they become the norm, given the size of data sets and video files. This was especially apparent as I used these tools on this Xeon powerhouse.

Related Links

AMD
www.amd.com

Intel
www.intel.com

Lite-On
www.liteon.com

National Instruments
www.ni.com

Seagate
www.seagate.com