cheap hardware

• CPUs (32bit & 64bit)

  • Intel P4 @3.2GHz, AMD Athlon XP3200+ @2.2GHz
  • Intel Itanium, AMD Opteron
  • RISC (IBM/Motorola PowerPC)

• memory - high speed DDR RAM

• fast disks (EIDE, Ultra Fast SCSI)

• (standard) high-speed Ethernet network

  • 100 MBps, 1 GBps, 10 GBps