I have just started as cluster system administrator and was asked to choose some features to get bought a personal machine to work on, and most intensive calculations will be perform in the cluster. I am a Linux (Ubuntu) user and I do not really know which features I should select at least. Do you know any Linux distribution works better than others for this purpose?I thought:8+ Cores16/32 GB RAM3 GHzGraphics?Video?Hard diskProcessor: Intel Xeon, Intel Core...?I would really appreciate if you have specific considerations to the hardware to tell me.
Hardware specs for Linux machine for cluster administration
memory;hard disk;hardware;cpu;software distribution
Having a cluster to do any heavy-lifting that occurs lowers the requirements for your personal desktop.I was a sysadmin for a few small clusters for the phylogenetics group at Dalhousie University for a few years.  All I ever needed on my own desktop was a text editor, terminal emulator+ssh client, and web browser.  One of our clusters came with remote KVM-over-IP which ran a Java applet in a web browser.  That's probably the most compute-intensive thing involved.If you're developing software to run on the cluster, as well as admin it, you still don't need a lot of cores on your desktop.  If you need to test some MPI code with actual multiple nodes, rather than threads on one machine, you run it on the cluster, not your desktop.So I'd suggest an Intel i5 with 8GB of RAM, or 16GB if that's cheap enough.  SSD for most filesystems, spinning rust for /data if needed.  Depending on what field you work in, you might need more 3D power than you'll find built-in to the GPU on an Intel Skylake.  In that case, NVidia has the best closed-source drivers.  AMD has better open-source drivers, but the open-source drivers are not really good enough.Xeon or i3 with ECC RAM is not much more expensive, and gives you an extra level of protection from cosmic rays flipping bits.