[seul-edu] How big a server?

[Jan Hlavacek <jhlavacek@sf.edu>]

Hi everybody,

I am sure there must be somebody out there who has done something
similar and can give me some advice: 

our college has several student labs running NTs. Our department (math)
is currently the only department that uses Linux, and our usage has been
so far restricted to a web server running WIMS. We always wanted to make
some of the excellent unix math software available to our students on
the desktop. We have a budget proposal for a linux lab, but that will
take a while to get through (if it ever goes through). 

Lately, our chemistry department contacted us asking for help setting up
some sort of unix solution for their students.  One possible solution I
found is using an x-server on the NT machines in the labs to login to
one linux server. I managed to get cygwin with xfre86 running over the
network from a SMB share, and it works beautifully with my desktop linux
machine. However, to actually be able to use this we will need powerful
enough server to support many simultaneous connections. And this is wnat
my question is:

We may have several hundreds items in passwd file, and as much as 50
(usually not more than 25, but let's assume two classes working at the
same time) users logged in at once.  The applications used would be some
mathematical software (CAS of a sort, octave, maybe kseg or drgenius),
molecular modelling software and some other computational chemistry
stuff, so it may be kind of computationally intensive, but i wouldn't
expect anything outrageus, these are undergraduate students.  Does
somebody have any estimate about how big machine (memory, CPU) am I
looking for?  

Thank a lot for any suggestions or pointers to information.

-- 
Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
Department of Mathematics                             Jhlavacek@sf.edu
University of Saint Francis               http://www.sf.edu/jhlavacek/