I have two machine options at our University. First, there is a Sun
Microsystems Enterprise 4500 with 8 UltraSPARC-II Processors and 8 GB
RAM
running Solaris 8. Will STATA be able to utilize the full 8 GB of this
machine?
I have a smaller Sun Enterprise multiprocessor server with 2 Gb RAM
running Solaris 8 and Stata/SE 8. No Unix process can use the full RAM
available on the machine. Typically, the system limits are set so that
a single process can use 50% of the available RAM. It depends on how
the sysadmin has set limits, which are per-user as well as systemwide
(I have sometimes upped the limit for one of our users with a
short-term need for more than 1 Gb RAM).
He also asked
My second option is a set of Unix machines that are in a cluster. Is
STATA
scalable so that it can make use of several CPUs in a cluster or must in
run on a single machine?
A single Stata process cannot make use of more than one CPU on this
machine (obviously, four separate Stata processes can fully utilize the
machine). But Stata does not recognize a multiprocessor system as being
able to work with more than one processor. This is not unusual; MATLAB
for a while supported multiprocessing, and would use all four CPUs; the
next release of MATLAB removed that tendency.
