Clone #1: PC for scientific computing

[mfenn]

Sorry, thanks for the correction.

The 460 is still a much better deal.

No argument there.

 

[piasabird]

Seems like $134.00 is a lot to pay for a motherboard if you are trying to keep costs down. Why do you need two PCI-Express X16 slots? If you are not using them dont pay for them.

 

[Davidh373]

460GTX is the best card you can find for the money, but just because it performs that much better in Crysis, does not mean it will be that much better in GPGPU, unless Farcry 2 is a decent comparison to scientific calculation...?

 

[mornington]

Seems like $134.00 is a lot to pay for a motherboard if you are trying to keep costs down. Why do you need two PCI-Express X16 slots? If you are not using them dont pay for them.

Yep, have switched motherboards on mfenn's recommendation.

460GTX is the best card you can find for the money, but just because it performs that much better in Crysis, does not mean it will be that much better in GPGPU, unless Farcry 2 is a decent comparison to scientific calculation...?

I'd still go with a GTS 450. CUDA isn't that abstract yet, and you want something that at least resembles the high-end Tesla chips

Makes sense. GTS 450 it is. Do you have anything I can read to understand what you mean when you say CUDA is not that abstract yet? You presumably mean that the implementation is not uniform...

 

[mfenn]

Makes sense. GTS 450 it is. Do you have anything I can read to understand what you mean when you say CUDA is not that abstract yet? You presumably mean that the implementation is not uniform...

I mean that you have to know some of the architectural details of the card to get the best performance. You need to know things like how many threads are in a warp, how much memory is available at each level of the cache hierarchy, etc.

 

[mornington]

I'd like to send out a big thank you to everyone who replied on this thread - in particular mfenn for the very helpful advice.
The first clone is now up and running (actually it was up and running a week ago) and I am gearing up for the hard parts (learning Linux, CUDA and MPI).

 

[betasub]

Glad you have had some success. Are you happy with your choice of hardware? Will Clone #2 be an exact hardware replica?

 

[mornington]

Well, since I still think in terms of having one very fast computer, I find the user experience pretty slow on the machine I built, but for a machine that will only be running computations (hopefully) very soon, round the clock, this is not what it is about.

The second clone (to be built over spring break!!) will probably will be very much like this one, except it will have no GPU (any additional GPUs will go into the first box) and I will probably not get another monitor either. Need to learn SSH-ing.

In any case, I have my hands full for the time being learning to navigate Linux!

 

[mornington]

Also, since I am here, I might as well get some quick advice. I was following the instructions here:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/022aug06/features/webserver/
and need a router with "port forwarding". Does this one fit the bill?
http://amzn.com/B000M2TAN4

 

[mnewsham]

Most routers do i believe you just need to go into the admin options, BUT that isnt my strong suit so i will let someone else give you a more definitive answer

 

[mfenn]

Also, since I am here, I might as well get some quick advice. I was following the instructions here:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/022aug06/features/webserver/
and need a router with "port forwarding". Does this one fit the bill?
http://amzn.com/B000M2TAN4

Pretty much any router will let you do port forwarding.

However, what you've linked is not a router! It's a simple switch. There are lots of routers available, but I would only buy one that is supported by DD-WRT. DD-WRT is basically a really stripped down version of Linux that's meant to be installed on consumer routers. You get the rock solid stability of Linux, but with a nice web configuration UI. Needless to say, it can do port forwarding. As for specific recommendations, I've got a Linksys E2000 with DD-WRT loaded on it and it works fine.