High processing power Linux machine help

How are you handling the chassis situation? It doesn't sound like your budget would support those processors given everything else, unless it's been bumped up again. 99% of the time motherboards and processors like that are built to use passive cooling in a ducted chassis with very good front-to-back airflow across the entire board with integrated redundant power supplies. You can expect to spend a solid $700+ on the chassis + PS if you do it right, plus another $500 for the mobo, $3400 on the procs, and you've hit your budget without any RAM or HDD.

When I said before that you want a good PS, I was NOT talking about a consumer grade Antec, Corsair, etc.

Don't underestimate the RAM, it's not that cheap when you're dealing with FB-DIMMs, though of course it depends on the quantity.

I built a system about a month ago using a pair of 2697v2 procs, 1TB SSD, and 128GB of RAM. I ended up going with a SuperMicro 2027PR-DTTR 2U twin chassis/mobo setup for it (only half is populated for the time being, I'll populate the other half in a year or so as the demand rises). Total cost was around $10k. $5500 on procs, $2500 on chassis/mobo, $2500 on RAM, $500 on the SSD.

Yeah, the RAM ended up being around 1k on sale for 64 GB. I'm going with lower end chassis and PSU for sure purely due to the cost. If the funding we applied for goes through we can upgrade later. The plan is basically to watch the loadings and heat and if it gets to be a issue we'll just turn it off until we fix it. I'll even pay for the parts out of pocket if I need too. I'm planning on adding my own ducting to a Full Tower case and it already has four 250mm fans and I'm adding in two 212 EVO's and additional fans, anyone notice how stock heat sinks NEVER are rated well for the CPU? The hope is that the heat won't get too bad since we shouldn't have the thing under full load constantly. Unfortunately, we definitely need to cheap out on some things, but we can always upgrade parts down the road as we get new funding. I don't doubt your expertise at all, just that we simply can't afford a solid PSU and case. I wouldn't touch a two MB build ever, probably a good thing too.

I can't say I'm a big supporter of that plan, but I hope it works out for you.

FWIW - the last time I used a consumer grade PS (it was a quality one from a name brand, I don't remember which one exactly but probably Antec), one day under no load just sitting idle, it blew and wiped out the entire system. Fried the motherboard, video card, and all hard drives. I built a new machine, plugged in one of the hard drives to try to recover the data off of it, and as soon as I applied power it lit on fire:

http://thesuicidaleggroll.com/hostin...521_resize.jpg
http://thesuicidaleggroll.com/hostin...522_resize.jpg

The system (including the PS) was about two years old at the time. I haven't touched them since, and I wouldn't put one anywhere near a $5k+ machine. Maybe it's just me.

I'm still on the pci-e ssd kick.

There are plenty of ram tricks that could be used to faux swap and cache and ramdrive. All of that is transparent with a pci-e ssd.


Now, you may have intense processing needs too but as far as I can tell you have a data path issue more.

Originally Posted by jefro I'm still on the pci-e ssd kick.

Ever since you first mentioned it in this thread, I've had my eye on the Asus RAIDR Express 240GB...just need to find an excuse to put it in something.

Oh yeah, definitely not denying the pci-e SSD's are nice stuff, I'm just worried my boss would be looking for a typcial drive and not be able to find it lol. He does swap drives somewhat frequently when he wants to consolidate data between labs. Maybe I'll put in a small one down the road, they are pretty expensive, I see why after doing digging on them.

Yeah... after seeing images of fried HDD's, I decided to foot the bill for a higher grade PSU myself. Nothing is more convincing than pictures of burnt hardware! I had a friend who was playing a game once, smelled something burning, thought his mind was playing tricks on him, and played for quite a while until he realized his computer was on fire lol. Definitely have to be careful on PSU's, but from what I've seen sometimes there are just bad eggs out there with broken breakers and controllers. I've seen people literally replacing PSU's with exactly the same kind they had for years and it explodes on them immediately. I had one that just didn't put out the power it needed to, replaced it and it worked fine. No idea why PSU's are so finnicky, prolly the consumer grade risk.

Pci-e ssd's have been on my wish list for quite some time. The OCZ's are only rated for 50G write a day but out of this world speeds/for the price. That and some careful ram choices and you would have a system to run these fortran calculations. The Xeon and Opteron's have choices that are better suited to speed. Generally it boils down to clock speeds for single threaded tasks.

A decent server with redundant psu's is common along with room ups or rack ups.