Hi there
The company I am working for has a dozen engineers doing analysies in Pro/M on rather old-school hardware. So I would like to pimp the concept of putting a stove in a corner that will only handle the solver bit, and preferrably also store FEA files, as the big corporate network is slow and the IT mongrels are complaining about storage.
I have been looking at offerings from SUN, HP, IBM and SGI, but I get lost in a forest of details. I would like a HPC computing server speced. Will you help me with this?
Assume that our budget for the hardware is around $50k or so.
Assume that we want the most bang for the buck, so old Netburst Xeons are probably out of the question. Opterons scale well with increasing CPUs, but Core Duo 2 Xeons seem to have the highest performance if you look at each one individually.
It is possible that Itanium2 or PA-RISC or other RISC CPU offerings could be worthwile, but I just don't know enough about them.
Assume that space is a small consideration, so I suppose blade servers are what we are looking for. If we can have it under a desk without getting our ears blown off, all is well. If it is a silent but full-size cupboard it is okay. If it needs a server room and a power plant of its own, it is not okay.
Assume that the RAM requirement is such as that today people are hitting the 3GB limit in Windows XP. I suppose most computations would fit 8 GB for the forseeable future.
Assume that the OS only matters in the sense that it must be 64-bit and run Pro/Mechanicas solver. The people here knows both UNIX, VMS and Windows.
Alternatively, I hear that one can use the ANSYS solver - is there any point in looking into that at all? They don't use the same method (P vs. M?) so why does this option exist at all?
I was looking at the SUN Fire X4600 and it looked quite nice at $36k, but it seems to only take two 2.5" SAS HDDs, which is inconvenient.
[url]http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&c mdStartWebConfig_CP&familyCode=SFX4600&baseSelected=2 [/url]
Edited by: MichailS
The company I am working for has a dozen engineers doing analysies in Pro/M on rather old-school hardware. So I would like to pimp the concept of putting a stove in a corner that will only handle the solver bit, and preferrably also store FEA files, as the big corporate network is slow and the IT mongrels are complaining about storage.
I have been looking at offerings from SUN, HP, IBM and SGI, but I get lost in a forest of details. I would like a HPC computing server speced. Will you help me with this?
Assume that our budget for the hardware is around $50k or so.
Assume that we want the most bang for the buck, so old Netburst Xeons are probably out of the question. Opterons scale well with increasing CPUs, but Core Duo 2 Xeons seem to have the highest performance if you look at each one individually.
It is possible that Itanium2 or PA-RISC or other RISC CPU offerings could be worthwile, but I just don't know enough about them.
Assume that space is a small consideration, so I suppose blade servers are what we are looking for. If we can have it under a desk without getting our ears blown off, all is well. If it is a silent but full-size cupboard it is okay. If it needs a server room and a power plant of its own, it is not okay.
Assume that the RAM requirement is such as that today people are hitting the 3GB limit in Windows XP. I suppose most computations would fit 8 GB for the forseeable future.
Assume that the OS only matters in the sense that it must be 64-bit and run Pro/Mechanicas solver. The people here knows both UNIX, VMS and Windows.
Alternatively, I hear that one can use the ANSYS solver - is there any point in looking into that at all? They don't use the same method (P vs. M?) so why does this option exist at all?
I was looking at the SUN Fire X4600 and it looked quite nice at $36k, but it seems to only take two 2.5" SAS HDDs, which is inconvenient.
[url]http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&c mdStartWebConfig_CP&familyCode=SFX4600&baseSelected=2 [/url]
Edited by: MichailS