We run some pretty beefy computers at work, and we've been allowed to start looking at a round of upgraded machines.
The person in charge of this task went to a vendor and they put together this system and gave us a price of about $8500. This was presented at a meeting and I thought we could do better in at least a few areas, if not the whole thing. I'd like to hit around $5k and bank the rest for a mid-cycle upgrade.
Here's what I'm looking at:
2 x XEON e5-2637V2 @ 3.5ghz
Supermicro Dual Socket Motherboard (doesn't specify which one)
8 x 16GB DDR3-1600 ECC RAM
Nvidia Quadro K5000 video card
Hard Drive Controller: LSI 2208 SAS2 Controller
HDDs: 1x256GB SSD, 2x600GB Hitachi 15k SAS2 drives in RAID0
900W Platinum Power Supply
So I realize that most of those parts are not brand specific. For now, I'm just trying to iron out which platforms are the best to go with. I'm mostly looking for suggestions on the CPU and HDDs.
To start out, I suppose I should say what we do. These systems will be mostly for people performing finite element analysis, which is very CPU, RAM, and HDD intensive. There is no set requirement for performance - we use all of what we have. If we have more CPU than we need, we build bigger models until we're using 100% of the capability. I typically will use 32-64GB of ram, but some people use more. If we don't have enough RAM to run in memory, our solutions will page to the hard drive, which is incredibly slow but sometimes necessary. So, drive speed is huge as well.
The software we typically use is late to the party when it comes to GPU calculations. They're releasing some versions that have support for Nvidia Quadro K5000 and Tesla cards, but anything other than that is unsupported. I may have the opportunity to see if I can get it to work with some gaming level cards, but that will come later. The software license to use GPU calculations is separate and may be prohibitively expensive. I still need to do some research on that. So for now lets not worry about the GPU.
On the CPU side, I can't even find the 2637V2 on Newegg. Searching around the web it seems to be a $1k part, 4 cores each, at 3.5Ghz for a total of $2k.
I'm thinking about suggesting a single E5-2630 (6 cores @ 2.2 ghz) for $650 instead, and allowing room in the future for a second CPU upgrade with the savings. I am not familiar with how fast the prices on these intel xeons drop over time to know if this is feasible. Is there a 'sweet spot' for xeon performance vs. cost?
On the hard drive side, I'm not sure I see the point in the extra $400 controller and the 2 15K rpm drives. Those 600GB drives are $300/each on newegg, which is pretty close to SSD prices.
I would think you would get far better performance for the money with 2 512GB SSDs in RAID0 right off of the motherboard, no? For the $1200 their setup costs ($400 controller card, 2x$300 600GB drives), I would much rather run 2 256GB SSD or 3x128 in RAID0 as my work space with a 2TB drive for storage (total ~$500) and put the rest into CPU and RAM instead. Admittedly I don't have experience to know if the controller card is necessary or not. I highly doubt we'd be doing anything more than 2 drive RAID0 as scratch space.
Thanks for the help guys.
The person in charge of this task went to a vendor and they put together this system and gave us a price of about $8500. This was presented at a meeting and I thought we could do better in at least a few areas, if not the whole thing. I'd like to hit around $5k and bank the rest for a mid-cycle upgrade.
Here's what I'm looking at:
2 x XEON e5-2637V2 @ 3.5ghz
Supermicro Dual Socket Motherboard (doesn't specify which one)
8 x 16GB DDR3-1600 ECC RAM
Nvidia Quadro K5000 video card
Hard Drive Controller: LSI 2208 SAS2 Controller
HDDs: 1x256GB SSD, 2x600GB Hitachi 15k SAS2 drives in RAID0
900W Platinum Power Supply
So I realize that most of those parts are not brand specific. For now, I'm just trying to iron out which platforms are the best to go with. I'm mostly looking for suggestions on the CPU and HDDs.
To start out, I suppose I should say what we do. These systems will be mostly for people performing finite element analysis, which is very CPU, RAM, and HDD intensive. There is no set requirement for performance - we use all of what we have. If we have more CPU than we need, we build bigger models until we're using 100% of the capability. I typically will use 32-64GB of ram, but some people use more. If we don't have enough RAM to run in memory, our solutions will page to the hard drive, which is incredibly slow but sometimes necessary. So, drive speed is huge as well.
The software we typically use is late to the party when it comes to GPU calculations. They're releasing some versions that have support for Nvidia Quadro K5000 and Tesla cards, but anything other than that is unsupported. I may have the opportunity to see if I can get it to work with some gaming level cards, but that will come later. The software license to use GPU calculations is separate and may be prohibitively expensive. I still need to do some research on that. So for now lets not worry about the GPU.
On the CPU side, I can't even find the 2637V2 on Newegg. Searching around the web it seems to be a $1k part, 4 cores each, at 3.5Ghz for a total of $2k.
I'm thinking about suggesting a single E5-2630 (6 cores @ 2.2 ghz) for $650 instead, and allowing room in the future for a second CPU upgrade with the savings. I am not familiar with how fast the prices on these intel xeons drop over time to know if this is feasible. Is there a 'sweet spot' for xeon performance vs. cost?
On the hard drive side, I'm not sure I see the point in the extra $400 controller and the 2 15K rpm drives. Those 600GB drives are $300/each on newegg, which is pretty close to SSD prices.
I would think you would get far better performance for the money with 2 512GB SSDs in RAID0 right off of the motherboard, no? For the $1200 their setup costs ($400 controller card, 2x$300 600GB drives), I would much rather run 2 256GB SSD or 3x128 in RAID0 as my work space with a 2TB drive for storage (total ~$500) and put the rest into CPU and RAM instead. Admittedly I don't have experience to know if the controller card is necessary or not. I highly doubt we'd be doing anything more than 2 drive RAID0 as scratch space.
Thanks for the help guys.
