Surprisingly, the single-processor PC worked best, Pozo said. There is a trade-off. But each processor is sharing a bus to memory, and it gets more and more difficult to feed them. Quad processors can plug away at massive amounts of data, but if the system cannot feed enough data to the processors, they sit idle, he said. Pozo said there is a point of diminishing returns at which multiple processors do not increase a system's power.
Cost also favors using single-processor PCs.
Hit singles Pozo plans to soup up JazzNet by adding nine more single-processor PCs. Calif. JazzNet runs Red Hat Software Inc.'s Linux operating system. The Research Triangle, N.C., company' s OS is similar to Unix, which Pozo said was a real plus because most of the NIST scientists use Unix. And Linux can handle multiple machines on a single network better than other systems he experimented with, Pozo said. Another advantage to JazzNet is easy system maintenance.