Hi guys, So the Bottlenecks are CPU and Ram, all cpu cores are currently maxed out and the devs tell me that the Ram speeds are too slow.
We currently have 72 cores maxed out, Ideally if the budget permits looking to double that.
In terms of software, it's all in house developed software haven't got a clue what those guys are actually doing.
Ok cool - if you have an opening with the Devs, ask them about the software and what kind of compiler optimisations they make to it, E.G are they specifically building it for Intel CPUs / Intel specific instructions, does it care a lot about memory memory bandwidth? Can it take advantage of accelerator cards with CUDA / OpenCL?
If just looking for something more modern and efficient and assuming its a pretty standard app and none of the above applies it might be worth taking a look at the HPE DL385 Gen10 or similar Epyc servers, AMD option will let you end up with more compute power and memory capacity for less than the cost of the equivalent performance from an Intel server, in 2u of rackspace - you will get more cores / threads and memory capacity for your money.
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getdocument.aspx?docname=a00026913enw
If going Intel you probably want to be looking at at the 28 core 56 thread Xeon scalable CPUs - in a 2 CPU server you cannot achieve the memory or core counts of the EPYC servers, but you will more than beat the perf of the current server you use. You made need to look at Xeon Platinum if you want to get an 8 CPU system - though not many vendors actually ship servers with Xeon scalable platinum CPUs, a Xeon gold system will top out at 4 CPUs - so if looking to really add a lot of power and assuming you can't use GPUs / compute cards then a box with 4 X 28core / 56 thread Xeon and a terabyte of memory would probably be where it's at for you.
If memory bandwidth is extremely critical to performance, then Epyc might be worth testing as it's 8 channel memory per CPU with a faster memory than Xeon scalable gen 1, Xeon scalable gen 2 will be more competitive than gen 1 due to increased memory speed / bandwidth
As your budget is reasonable it might be worth finding some kit to evaluate your software on (you can rent physical servers of various types to test on - sometimes resellers will provide evaluation kit if you ask)
4 way Intel box is probably the safest choice without knowing a lot more about the setup (edit: if memory bandwidth is critical ensure you have enough ram to max out all memory channels for every CPU in the system)
