[Help] My first home server to do a lot of different things!

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Sean Ho

Sean Ho

seanho.com
Nov 19, 2019
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Vancouver, BC
seanho.com
I'm still not entirely clear what your use cases are for this build:

Databases, Servers, VMs, Mathematic and Physics simulations
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The first three are all standard for homelab; hardware requirements depend on the details of what services in particular you want to run.

The last two could easily be the defining requirements for the node -- or they could add nothing, depending on what the workload is and how important it is to you. If it is important, then you should have a test suite with realistic data as a benchmark. Is it easily parallelised? Is it primarily CPU-bound or memory-bound? Are there basic compute kernels that can be offloaded via OpenCL/CUDA?

several vm instead buy several pcs for the future
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Are you thinking of VDI? About how many seats? What would the client workload look like?

As an illustration of how important it is to have clear requirements, if your actual workload is akin to the typical homelab uses like Home Assistant, Plex, BitWarden, backups, etc., plus small experiments with MATLAB and the VDI, then you could achieve this much more cheaply with a consumer ATX board (e.g., 1151-2) for NAS + MATLAB, plus whatever case you can find affordably with the desired number of drive bays. Less than $400 in the US, excluding storage. Instead of VDI, a fleet of used corporate SFF (1151-1) for $60 each. I'm not saying this is the best solution for your needs, but I'm saying that without further clarity on your actual workload, we can't say what would be an optimal solution for your needs. And if you yourself are unclear, my advice is to start small and upgrade later when you know more.
 
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latot

Member
May 7, 2023
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@Sean Ho I agree with you, but is not for a specific requirement, the idea of this build, is that to allow me have my ideas and experiments, and... they are not focused on one topic... but I agree would be similar to a homelab.

In my case I see, "ooo torrents! great! they even can do checksums of data" so I wrote a program, then ":O I would like to handle math operations with specific bit and simulate them!" then I write other program, "I would like have a stream service" I write other program......"!! lets design this mathematics model! and simulate it!.... Usually every program have a different bottleneck, ones are the cpu, others the disks, others the ram, other ones is better to run on OpenCL/CUDA.

But I can't afford to have one pc per process I want to run, and how I usually put there hard work, I means that can't be solved in low time unless you use some cores.... and this repeats with each idea all the time. I easily can continue saying more and more ideas I do and did, maybe the actual build is like overkill, but I want to it be able to handle what I'll want to do in the future.

I want to use VDI to isolate process, if I do a mistake, I don't want to the machine to stop and need to reset, so put every project on one would be great.

This would be much easier of the build is for a specific requirement.

But at least I for what I do, 2TB, 32 threads, 64gb of ram, the three points are very low for some projects... when that happens I need to spend more time trying to optimize every process instead be able to spend the time developing the ideas. Probs I'll still need to optimize, but I expect to reduce the amount of time for that, and be able to keep running several projects at the time.

Note: What parts I already buy, PSU, mobo, ram. Left case, cpu (very close to buy) and cpu cooler.
 
Sean Ho

Sean Ho

seanho.com
Nov 19, 2019
775
359
63
Vancouver, BC
seanho.com
OK, I didn't realise you already bought the board. I'm sure you'll be quite happy with Epyc Rome. I agree that dev machines generally need to be stronger to handle a diverse range of experiments, and that programmer time spent optimising code can be much more expensive than just throwing more hardware at the issue. In my experience with modelling / simulation and scientific computation, subsampling or otherwise simplifying the scope of the problem can be an effective way to speed up dramatically the dev cycle.

It sounds like your use of VMs is as separate sandboxes for each of your projects. While this is one way, perhaps revision control like git might be more appropriate and effective. Separate code vs data vs environment config; containerise your projects and keep the Dockerfile and CI config also under revision control. You will eventually have to do this for any projects that you wish to put in production or share/collaborate with others.
 
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latot

Member
May 7, 2023
36
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6
Yay! the build is almost done!

The last piece that I still I'm not able to select is the CPU cooler, the original one to use the arctic freezer 4u sp3, but I was not able to found where to buy it.... aliexpress, amazon, ebuy, no place! I want to avoid the noctua one due to the fan orientation.

So searching I found:

Dynatron, there is a lot of this ones! Air Cooler | DYNATRON Corp. | Air cooler,Liquid cooler,CPU cooler,OEM,ODM | Union City, CA

From there, I would prefer the A50, is the most powerful one, it seems to have a lot of noise, but after checking is not that much, if compare at specific rpm with other fans, has 8000rpm for max.

CoolerMaster P42 4U 6: https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005003386166928.html

Supermicro SNK-P0064AP4 H11 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/334351861634

Silverstone XE04-SP3 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/304954140384

Oks..... now the hard part.... which one to choose!

I was only be able to found data of the Dynatron A38... https://www.phoronix.com/review/dynatron-a38-epyc

For the A39: https://www.phoronix.com/review/dynatron-a39-epyc

Still the Dynatron A50 should be better than A39.

Hope someone can help to choose between the options!

Thx
 
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