Best CPU for engineering? Help!

[FEA pro]

What is the best CPU out now for running large simulations. I’m talking millions of points of freedom.  The software used would be FEA type engineering programs like COMSOl, Ansys, and Abaqus. 

 

Some of the more complex simulation for say a structural crash simulation of a car frame can easily run into the hours to compute. Right now the current rig being used has 512 GB of RAM and that is not a typo!

 

With that said the unit is a few years old and we are looking to update. 

Honestly I don’t know a ton About computers but I do know the current setup has a card with slots for 4 CPUs and holds all that RAM. We can run Several smaller simulation at once but when we run complex simulations that is the only job being run. 

 

Would you guys recommend running AMD threadrippers? The new intel I9? Would using the I7 work and instead of say 6 I9 processors having 8-10 I7s?  

Im thinking the AMD threadripper series would be best because of all the cores, but honestly I have no idea, and this is a guess based off of tests I see where AMD does well for work stations. 

 

Also does anyone know what the bottleneck is when solving complex problems like this?  Is it really the CPU speed that matters or is it lanes or cores because so much data is run-stored-retrieved and analyzed again-basically is it the back and forth of all that data onto RAM that is the bottleneck.

What I am asking is why do some simulations take 30 hours to run and how can we cut that time down? Or is the obvious answer to just rent space on a supercomputer? 

[Brooksie359]

I had to use ansys autodyn for a car crash simulation and as far as I could tell it would scale up to a point depending on how big the simulation was. There was definitely diminishing return when it came to core count but if you had a really big simulation the cores scaled for longer before you hit diminishing returns. Looking at Puget systems benchmarks it looks like FEA scales extremely well with cores. 

[FEA pro]

That helps a lot so my “guess” that AMD with many cores may have the leg up when it comes to this type of processing. 

Thanks for the info!

[Brooksie359]

If you are not making this purchase right away it might be worth waiting for Zen 2 to come out as it will have double the avx performance.