I work in a research institute and a number of programs we use are computationally intensive (I actually wrote one of them). Right now we have one computer that is dedicated for one of these programs (with local accounts only, as in users physically sitting in front of that pc) and the other programs are run on individual workstations assigned to people.

I have been looking around to common brands such as Dell and HP, for a some sort of a small/medium scale server, which can be used as a workhorse by sending tasks remotely. It appears as if there is nothing in between workstations with one 6-core processor and a bunch of extras (like fancy graphics etc) and rack mount servers with ridiculous amount of RAM and HDD expansion capabilities but still relatively little number of processors/cores.

I wonder if what I am looking for is such a small niche product? Are there other solutions that I might not be aware of? Does anyone know of a multi proc- multi-core workstation/server that is still within the reasonable