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Ask Slashdot: Best Bang-for-the-Buck HPC Solution?

Posted by Soulskill on from the 14,000-raspberry-pis dept.

An anonymous reader writes: We are looking into procuring a FEA/CFD machine for our small company. While I know workstations well, the multi-socket rack cluster solutions are foreign to me. On one end of the spectrum, there are companies like HP and Cray that offer impressive setups for millions of dollars (out of our league). On the other end, there are quad-socket mobos from Supermicro and Intel, for 8-18 core CPUs that cost thousands of dollars apiece.

Where do we go from here? Is it even reasonable to order $50k worth of components and put together our own high-performance, reasonably-priced blade cluster? Or is this folly, best left to experts? Who are these experts if we need them?

And what is the better choice here? 16-core Opterons at 2.6 GHz, 8-core Xeons at 3.4 GHz? Are power and thermals limiting factors here? (A full rack cupboard would consume something like 25 kW, it seems?) There seems to be precious little straightforward information about this on the net.

3 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Look for other users of the S/W for advice by peterjt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why not start with looking at what S/W you plan to run, and then see what advice is available from them (and from other users) as to what H/W they would recommend.

    1. Re:Look for other users of the S/W for advice by JamesTRexx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Precisely this. Do not look at the hardware for hardware's sake, look at the needs to run the software as best as you can. Does it benefit from parallelism? Throw tons of Opteron cores at it. Does it benefit from speed? Get the fastest Intels. Can it do everything in RAM? Stuff the servers with it, etc. etc.. Also, if it is built to scale, start with one or two servers, then see what kind of load it causes and base the next nodes you add on that data. You might even want to consider starting off with a virtual environment for portability to other hardware or cloud providers.

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    2. Re:Look for other users of the S/W for advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I will third this. I will also state that I was directly involved in building a home grown cluster that was highly ranked in the Top500 List a little over a decade ago.

      You MUST begin with needs analysis and that goes WAY beyond just looking at research domains, in this case FEA and CFD. You have to know what software you want to run. You must also research and find out if there are alternatives to what software you currently run (or are initially planning to run) that may have modern competitors that run more efficiently.

      I will also note that FEA and CFD have different resource needs, and therefore different hardware configurations that would be optimally suited for those tasks (I think someone else in this thread has already brought this point up below), so if you do want to run both types of software packages on the same machine you will be making some compromises on efficiencies and configuration to do that. Most of the FEA code that our researchers ran was run on single-system image, shared memory machines (SGI), not an MPI-based, distributed memory cluster where the CFD and MD/QD folks get their best bang for the buck. I don't know how much that has changed in the last few years, but I would imagine, not much.

      I will keep an eye on this thread over the next couple of days. If the OP wishes to contact me I'd be happy to help them work on this challenge. We can figure out how to connect if I get a reply to this post.