Best CPU for intense simulations

[Waterguy]

Hi,

The company I work for does a lot of work running Simulations for Rainfall and Flood modelling. (I.E on models of towns and cities, the software we use predicts flow, velocity, volume etc every minute over year long periods.)
The work is done on the main processor and not a GPU. as far as I know

Just wondering whether IVy bridge would offer significant improvement in simulation times.. Lets say for example I want to run a year Sim, which would take 2 days with all 4 cores at 100%.

What would be the most suitable choice for a mainstream processor to run such simulations? (I doubt the company would want to overclock it, unless it was in built turbo)

Kind regs,

 

[sehcure]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-396-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1672

If you're sure it's only CPU and as long as they have a big budget to play with for the sim computer.

 

[Jokester]

Assuming it can make use of all the threads:-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-393-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1672

 

[andybird123]

rumours are that ivybridge would show a 10% improvement clock for clock

so you'd get a massive improvement by OC'ing compared with just swapping stock clocked CPU's out

mind you, you could just by an OCUK pre-overclocked system - that comes with full warranty even on the OC

 

[sehcure]

rumours are that ivybridge would show a 10% improvement clock for clock

so you'd get a massive improvement by OC'ing compared with just swapping stock clocked CPU's out

mind you, you could just by an OCUK pre-overclocked system - that comes with full warranty even on the OC

That's compared to the sandybridge though - I don't think ivy bridge will have anything that'll compare with the 2011 socket cpus (3960x/3930k perhaps even the quad core 3820)

 

[appletree]

As someone mentioned, this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-396-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1672

Or if money is no problem and company wishes for processing to be as fast as possible then they can always buy dual CPU socket Xeon workstations - you can equip them with two 6 core Xeon CPUs - configuration like that would completely destroy any mainstream configuration - assuming you can fully utilize all cores.

Btw you are asking if IB will be imporovement, but you forgot to mention improvement over which CPU you have on mind. (e.g. over mainstream CPUs from 3 years ago ? over mainstream CPU like Sandy Bridge ?)

 

[AndyOcUK]

Hi,

The company I work for does a lot of work running Simulations for Rainfall and Flood modelling. (I.E on models of towns and cities, the software we use predicts flow, velocity, volume etc every minute over year long periods.)
The work is done on the main processor and not a GPU. as far as I know

Just wondering whether IVy bridge would offer significant improvement in simulation times.. Lets say for example I want to run a year Sim, which would take 2 days with all 4 cores at 100%.

What would be the most suitable choice for a mainstream processor to run such simulations? (I doubt the company would want to overclock it, unless it was in built turbo)

Kind regs,

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/tesla_computing_solutions.html

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/weather_uk.html

If your guys can't code/ port your software to CUDA, 990X or 3930K.

 

[inSilica]

As others have said, the Tflops at your fingertips on GPU's make allot more sense in comparison to simulations overt the Gflops available on your CPU.

The is an issue though, will you invest in rewriting the simulation code to run on Cuda?

It doesn't have to be NVIDIA either. Personally I prefer the OpenCL platform even though it has some issues in comparison to CUDA.