What Components are Needed for Building a High-Performance Computer?

[leon1127]

Hi guys,

Now I want to build a computer for intensive calculation. I am expecting to spend somewhere 4000 dollars just for machine. The only thing I must need is nvidia video card. hhd size isn't important but the speed is. Do you guys have any suggestion?

 

[robphy]

http://littlefe.net/

 

[leon1127]

http://littlefe.net/

Very interesting link. However I am a mathematician not a computer builder. I do find building computer entertaining but I looking for something practical and ready to be used for numerical programming.

 

[rootX]

Hi guys,

Now I want to build a computer for intensive calculation. I am expecting to spend somewhere 4000 dollars just for machine. The only thing I must need is nvidia video card. hhd size isn't important but the speed is. Do you guys have any suggestion?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,119273-page,1/article.html

 

[robphy]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,119273-page,1/article.html

That article is from "Friday, January 28, 2005, 11:00 AM PST".

You might prefer a Core 2 Quad with 12MB of L2-cache:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/09/dell-makes-core-2-quad-q9300-q9450-available-in-xps-420/

the Dell XPS420: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsdt_420?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

 

[vociferous]

Yes, with $4000, you should be able to build something nice.

With that kind of money, you should probably look at an ASUS board with dual Opteron or Xeon processors. That will give you eight processor cores. Then, you should load it up with eight GB of DDR 2 RAM and one or two Nvidia cards. Buy a 1000-1500 watt power supply.

Also, you should probably have money left over to make a five or six hard drive RAID 5 array. Be sure to buy a UPS.

For about $4000 you can build a very powerful computer, as I mentioned, capable of driving four monitors (which can be used for CUDA if necessary), with eight processor cores.

And, as an added bonus, you could choose to run 64 Bit XP, Vista, or 2008, or most Unix systems, so it should be good for whatever kind of software and operating system you need the workstation for.

Your other option, if it is suitable and you have the technical expertise, is to buy some used computers, install Linux on them, and run a Beowulf cluster, which might be more cost efficient than a single computer, and would not require a graphics card.

 

[Asphodel]

Now I want to build a computer for intensive calculation. I am expecting to spend somewhere 4000 dollars just for machine. The only thing I must need is nvidia video card. hhd size isn't important but the speed is. Do you guys have any suggestion?

Why nVidia?

Does your application benefit from parallelism?

 

[B. Elliott]

Nvidia does currently have more perks when it comes to incorporating the GPU for computational power...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Tesla

Nvidia blows out Moore’s Law with fresh Tesla

Nvidia pitches its Tesla hardware as a magical solution for the world’s toughest computing problems. Just move your code that runs well across many processors over to the Tesla boards, and Shazam!. You enjoy sometimes 400 per cent improvements in overall performance.

Despite such mind-blowing increases in horsepower, Tesla continues to occupy a space that one could characterize as ultra-niche. Only the brave few have navigated Nvidia’s CUDA programming apparatus to tweak their code for the general purpose graphics processors inside of the Tesla systems.

That ultra-niche, however, may grow into a niche over the coming year thanks to the introduction of more powerful Tesla systems.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/16/nvidia_tesla_10/

 

[leon1127]

I am going to write apps with CUDA. This is the whole idea

 

[vociferous]

Get a big case, a 1500 watt power supply (try ultra), and a motherboard with 4 PCI express x16 slots, and throw in four Nvidia cards (or start out with two, and then add the others when they come down in price).

http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html