Comsol workstation (budget up to £3k)

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 11:18

I've just started working as a nanofluid researcher at leeds uni, the department has just bought 1 comsol licence at a cost of around 3k, the software is multithreaded and might be able to use gpu processing (not 100% on this). As the pc available is fairly old and low end there is up to 3k budget for a pc (no need to use it all though) to run this software to allow larger and faster simulations. I am unsure what exactly to go for as there are a lot of options with this budget. For single socket solutions I have come up with 2 possibilities:

Value for money:

Premium:

I'm thinking it might make more sense to get a quad socket G34 board with 4x 8 core opterons for about £1800 (plus other gubbins) as in this thread. This would also allow a large amount of ram for a lowish price. I am not sure if I could just put W7 on this and have comsol running across all cores when doing simulations or not.

Any advice especially from someone who might have done this before is appreciated.

stulid · 31 Jan 2012 at 11:35

How about an Nvidia card to get CUDA support, a quick Google brings up a few plugins to be able to use this feature.

The more threads you can process at once the better, so I was going to say a multi-CPU setup like the Opteron, but there are X79 boards on their way which will take dual socket2011 XEON/SB-E chips.

If you remember EVGA did the SR-2 board, well they have a SR-X and ASUS also have a competing product that has been shown at trade fairs.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/asus-s-dual-socket-2011-workstation-motherboard--z9pe-d8-ws/14488.html
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/1/16/ces-2012-take-a-tour-of-the-evga-suite.aspx

These types of boards will obviously need a suitable case to house them do to their size which is likely to be HPTX form factor,

Reaper 392 · 31 Jan 2012 at 11:39

a quick read makes me think it does not support graphics accelerated processing such as cuda and the ATI equivalent, aside from a couple of plugins

would a watercooled PC be of any interest, or should i just stick to air?
also, what kind of graphics card do you think will be needed for the program? are we looking at reasonably graphically intensive simulations, or not so much?

Subliminal Aura · 31 Jan 2012 at 11:41

When selecting the GPU my head always hurts

Have you looked into the benefits of firegl/quadro ?

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 11:52

Keeping it air cooled for simplicity, unless using the gpu for processing it is not important to have a high end gpu, interested in the numerical results rather than fancy graphics. It soounds like cpu power is most important now.

If multi socket is chosen I think the only way to go is opteron 6128 as they are almost half the price of the next cheapest multi socket cpu. Intel is simply to expensive.

Edit: Intel cpus for reference:

waso_dude · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:03

I Have recently been spec'ing up something very simular, In the end, we went for some dual 6core xeons in a workstation setup from a big computer supplier ( did cost 2.7k) . As in all honesty, for something like this, the support of a warrant is a big factor. Also the 6core Xeons preform the same if not better than the same spec i7's.

If I was to go custom route, I'd have 100% have gone for the 2011 socket intel platform.

Subliminal Aura · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:09

OP might also want to look into whether you can create a Comsol render farm. Google failed me so it looks unlikely.

Therefore dual socket xeons could be a wise move = 12 cores == 12 x 4gb per core = 48gig of RAM.

http://www.comsol.com/products/requirements/windows/

Niiiiiiice !

EDIT: I built something similar as part of a 3d render farm and SMP really worked well as opposed to faster cores

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:10

I am thinking that single socket will be much less hassle, 4x 6128 opterons with motherboard for about £1600-1800 might offer a lot of cpu power for the price though, with the option of up to 128-256GB (4x 8 ram sockets) of fairly cheap non ecc DDR3. I am not sure if comsol and w7 can actually cope with 32 threads and that much ram though. If it can the quad opteron is very appealing.

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:13

Yeah the basic requirements for running comsol are very low but simiulations will take weeks on such a setup if they are large, or won't even be able to run due to ram.

stulid · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:31

I notice the second cpu list doesnt take into account Hyperthreading.

So the X5680 is 6 physical cores/12 threads.

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:42

Logical cores in that list refer to the additional threads from hyperthreading which is why L5609 has 0. One X5680 costs about the same as 4 6128s with motherboard.

The idea of 32 cores with 64gb of ram for about £2.5k seems fairly popular in the office.

stulid · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:53

Not to clued up on xeons etc, but all those are old socket1366, sure intel have something newer coming based on socket2011.

Subliminal Aura · 31 Jan 2012 at 12:58

jak731 said:
The idea of 32 cores with 64gb of ram for about £2.5k seems fairly popular in the office.

That's one thing out of the way ... but what about the graphics card?

For rendering it's going to be top dog but the actual user experience may not be. I've had a user turn round and say '******* slow isn't it' :rolleyes:

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:19

I'm thinking of a Supermicro H8QGI+-F-B which comes with onboard matrox graphics (didn't realise they were still going :eek:

) but 2.5k includes a 6670 which should be fine for desktop use and mild 3d modelling prior to simulations.

Problems that remain:

Case

Will comsol 4.2 actually utilise 32 threads, if not go single socket instead

Supplier

stulid · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:22

http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=NzA0NTA0&lan=us

Its newer, bigger and has support XL-ATX

Heres the release/hardware gudie notes (dated this year) - http://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/866/

sidethink · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:27

waso_dude said:
I Have recently been spec'ing up something very simular, In the end, we went for some dual 6core xeons in a workstation setup from a big computer supplier ( did cost 2.7k) . As in all honesty, for something like this, the support of a warrant is a big factor. Also the 6core Xeons preform the same if not better than the same spec i7's.

This!!

Talk to your University IT department - even if they dont support the device in the end, you should be able to leverage their purchasing power with their suppliers. If thats Dell or HP, then you should have access to genuine scientific workstations backed up by Next Business Day multi year support.

They should also be able to supply you with an OS license and may be some other bits and bobs besides.

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:34

The Supermicro H8QGI+-F-B is SWTX form factor (419*330mm), the board actually extends above the ports on the back (in the same way expansion slots are below the ports on a normal board):

Not sure if the P280 has the space

stulid · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:35

Not sure if any case has the room for that beast

Quick google - http://www.chenmingusa.com/Fileserver.html -http://www.tech-forums.net/pc/f76/f...cases-hptx-meb-swtx-size-motherboards-244764/

kristmace · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:36

stulid said:
Not sure if any case has the room for that beast

Mobo on a table - ultimate cooling.

Seriously though, a case could be hard to find...

jak731 · 31 Jan 2012 at 13:38

sidethink said:
This!!

Talk to your University IT department - even if they dont support the device in the end, you should be able to leverage their purchasing power with their suppliers. If thats Dell or HP, then you should have access to genuine scientific workstations backed up by Next Business Day multi year support.

They should also be able to supply you with an OS license and may be some other bits and bobs besides.

Hmm would take the fun out of it a bit but might be more sensible. We were planning on comparing with the cost of a similar system, IT here is limited to purchasing stone or dell machines though.