ESyS-Particle

what machine do you recommend for esys-particle?

Asked by Robert Sarracino

Eventually we'll be using a supercomputer to run Esys-Particle, but in the meantime I'd like to buy a more powerful desktop / work station. I assume Esys-particle will run much faster if I get a machine with a GPU on the motherboard? We have about $5000 (CDN) to spend at the moment -- what machine / video card would you recommend to increase the processing speed?

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SteffenAbe
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Feng Chen (fchen3-gmail) said : 		#1

Hi, Robert:

As long as ESyS-P is not utilizing CUDA/GPU parallization, even if you have Kepler K20/40 will *not* speed up your simulation at all, more cores/memory might be able to help your performance.

Feng

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Best SteffenAbe (s-abe) said : 		#2

Hi Robert,

As Feng Chen stated, esys-particle is currently unable to use GPU acceleration. This is unlikely to change in the near future. What theoretically should work but is untested would be a Xeon Phi, because AFAIK you can run normal MPI code on that. No idea w.r.t. performance though.
Regarding a bigger desktop / server I'm not sure what 5000 CDN buys at the moment, but I'd probably recommend a dual-Xeon machine. I have recently bought a machine with 2 Xeon E5-2650v2 and I'm rather happy with that box. However, given the current exchange rates something like this would probably exceed you 5k budget so you may want to go with slightly slower CPUs . NB. esys-particle itself isn't particularly demanding w.r.t. RAM, so something like 16GB should be sufficient if you need to save money.

Steffen

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Toketo (tomcarlosimborio) said : 		#3

Machine? By that you mean CPU? Not really sure but I'd recommend the one with more cores. :D
+ ubuntu OS.

~Tom

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Robert Sarracino (robert-sarracino) said : 		#4

Thanks SteffenAbe, that solved my question.

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Robert Sarracino (robert-sarracino) said : 		#5

Thanks as well, Chen and Toketo.