I use a cutom box from Red Barn Computers in Binghamton, NY. It has dual Xeon E5-2690 @ 2.9 GHz (32 threads), 51 TB configured raid 6 data disk using 16 WD 4001 4 TB RE SAS hot-swap 6Bg/s disks, 256 GB DDR3 ECC ram, two 600 GB WD6000 OS disks in a raid 0 config, one 256 GB SSD as swap space, hot-swap dual power, 10 Gb/s networking, and runs CentOS 6. Current uptime is 901 days (since Hurricane Sandy). I use it as my "desktop" over vnc from work or home. It is a mostly lightly-used node in an SGE cluster of 8 others like it, plus 16 more of slightly lower spec. I designed the cluster for massive single-node-based computation (avoiding network traffic and external fileservers), but all the boxes can work together if needed too. The application is mainly DNA analysis for scientific research purposes.