An evaluation of PCs for high energy physics under Windows NT and Linux Original Research Article

The high availability and commodity prices of Intel-based PCs have made them serious contenders to workstations. We address the question whether PCs are appropriate for running real physics codes. We evaluate the performance of Intel-based systems with two popular 32-bit operating systems, Linux and Windows NT. We report on a suite of benchmark tests, both generic and HEP-specific, where we compare the performance of these two systems to each other, and to other popular workstation class machines.