Installation Base environment and add-ons for computing
 

Hi everybody,
Probably my question is very basic for most users of this forum, but I am new to the Linux / Centos world and my doubts are from a beginner.

I work in science and currently I have to prepare a computer with operating system CENTOS7 for a new data processing software that I will use. These are the characteristics of the equipment that I will use:
- 2 x 2,4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
- 8 cores, 256 KB L2 cache per core, 12 MB L3 cache per Processor
- 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 (8 slots x 4 Gb)
- 250 Gb SSD disk for the operating system
- (2 x 2 Tb) HD disk in a RAID for data storage

On the other hand these are the recommendations of the software developer for the installation:
- Supported on 64 bit Linux using Intel and AMD processors
- Disk space required for installation: 91,345,683 Bytes
- "The amount of memory needed for compute nodes is highly dependent on the type and size of data being processed and the algorithms being applied. A traditional rule of thumb has been to configure compute nodes with at least 2 Gb of RAM per core with a 32 Gb minimum. This configuration has worked well for systems with fewer than 32 cores and that are primarily focused on time processing."
- "For login nodes we recommend at least 64 Gb of RAM if being utilized by a single users."
- "Swap should equal 2x physical RAM for up to 2 GB of physical RAM, and then an additional 1x physical RAM for any amount above 2 GB, but never less than 32 MB. For systems with really large amounts of RAM (more than 32 GB) you can likely get away with a smaller swap partition (around 1x, or less, of physical RAM)"

The team will only use it to process data (volumes around 100 Gb of data), so I need a very basic desktop environment but the installation is optimized to get the best performance for handling this data.

My question is what base environment and what add-ons should I select in the installation so that it is most advisable for me?

Thank you very much

Ah, you're in university, and consequently have to Battle for sanity.

Mention the server. Guys here know stuff, and will tell you. Mention the speed of your connections, or are you mining bitcoin?

Solved! I asked a collegue form other University and recommended me to install the Developers environment and (specifically for my topic work), create a SWAP partition of 64 Gb in other to manage the big data volume.