Cheap numbercrunching workstation

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Oct 21, 2015
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www.opensupport.it
Hi,

I haven't built a system for over ten years now and there has certainly been a lot of progress since then. Enough to where I feel I really don't have a good overview of the market anymore. It used to be simple!

This will be my typical workload:

  • ESXi platform
  • One Win7 Professional instance running scientific CAD software such as Ansys.
  • One instance running Ubuntu 14.04 with typical tasks being compiling, GNU Radio development, etc.
I have a Dell Precision M6600 workstation now and it's great. 32GB ram and 2760QM CPU. Three SSD drives.

Working with CAD on VMWare under Ubuntu is OK but a bit painful. I need more cores and RAM also.

So what about:
  • Dual E5-2670
  • Motherboard with DP and 16 DDR sockets. Probably start with 64GB but might want to upgrade to 128GB later.
  • Dual grapics card. I want to send each card via VT-d to Linux and Win7 respectively.
  • 1TB, or dual 512GB, SSD drives for OS installation.
I have dual boot on the M6600 but find myself always booting into Linux and working from there. It's just too much of a hassle to reboot and I need both environments concurrently.

I have a case that I can use. Can someone comment on feasibility? I'm happy with the 2670QM single thread performance and from what I understand it's been mostly incremental performance upgrades last couple of years. I do need AVX though so nothing less than Sandy Bridge will do. It does make a big difference in DP matrix solve performance as well as FFTW3 what I find myself waiting for.

Comments?

/K
you use this as a server? H24 power on? i'm interesting to buil similar system