I'm finding it difficult to get access to workstations in my present location, but there are servers here due to buisness demands. What would be the advantages/disadvantages in using a server for high memory calculations normally done on a workstation (i.e. 12 core 96 GB RAM)
My main concerns would be other users. This includes the possibility that you disrupt ordinary service provided by the server by e.g. causing excessive swapping or very high CPU usage, and that activity from these services make your results harder to reproduce, at least in terms of inconsistent execution times.
Workstation and server hardware are generally very similar. If your calculations can benefit from GPU acceleration, it is far from certain that your server has any reasonable GPU, though. On the other hand, some "workstations", even from reputable high-end manufacturers, can also be lacking in this area unless the machines were explicitly specified to contain high-performance compute-capable GPUs.
Dear Dr. Matt Bawn, Yes one can use the motherboard as a workstation. After checking available hardware built-in on the board may need some drivers. Check RAID, networks controllers. More about this question has already been explained by Dr. Carl Nettelblad
If
the servers are running UNIX./Linux,
the servers are lightly loaded at night, and
it is OK with the people who are the primary users of the server, and
your process will run overnight,
then
you can schedule the process to run after everyone else has left for the day
if the at command and/or the user level cron commands are not disabled,
you can use them. Other wise a simple
sleep 3600; nohup a.out > output &
issued one hour before it will start will work fine.
If the server stays up all the time, and off-hour use is acceptable, and there is
enough swap space, you can
start a processes, and remember its process id (pid) and then suspend it with
kill -STOP pid
and then have cron scripts run at
6pm to start it with
kill -CONT pid
and 6 am to suspend it with
kill -STOP pid
as long as you don't "pin" paging memory, your jobs will just get paged out when
people start using it after 6am and will start back running and page back in at
6pm each night. As long as the server is not shut down, you can run for weeks this day, getting 12 hours of compute each day. (More if you use weekend days.)
I agree with the above answers, but another thing to consider is that the graphics capability of most 'server' class machines is minimal. If you are doing something that requires lots of graphical output or using a resource intensive GUI (KDE comes to mind, but it's not the only one), the video card/memory and display on the server may not meet your needs.
Yes, it is possible to use a server as a workstation. Sure, this also depends on your task. But, where I am working most people use terminals doing their computations on servers. Only for very specific things they have their own workstations.
The GUI itself will not be your problem. Most people here use KDE as their desktop environment and it works fine. (But, you have to consider that our IT specifically runs our system such that this should work.) If you do computations on a server where other people are working you should consider restricting the number of processors your software will use. For high intensity computations we have separate compute servers and a cluster--both equipped with graphics cards or Tesla cards.
So, at least with Linux it is possible to use servers as workstations in general. But, here is what will not work that well. Simple OpenGL applications will work okay. But, if you use special features or have large datasets to be visualized then you certainly need a dedicated workstation. Doing stuff like this remotely does not work very well.
It depends on operating system of the server (for example it will be hard in Novell NetWare) but it is not good idea at all. Server should works as SERVice providER and use it as workstation can consume its resources and cause degradation of its performance. But (in some Windows Server Operating Systems) case it may be a good idea because of Windows Workstation OS versions supports only a limited number of processors (less then server version).
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