CPU(s) for CFD workstation

[Demon_of_Speed]

So I Am looking to buy a new workstation in the next year or so when prices calm down a little. I want to be able to do some CFD run using openFoam. What do I gain by going to epic vs threadripper? Does having two CPU's double my RAM availability? Does Intel have anything comparable in this space? I know it is recommended to have 5-6GB of RAM per CPU core.

 

Normally I run stuff at work on a HPC using around 600-1000 cores and don't think too much about the hardware. With that it still take around 12-24 hours to run.

 

Now I don't expect to have that level of performance, but I am interested in seeing what I can do in the $10k budget or so.

[Camofelix]

On 8/15/2021 at 5:41 PM, Demon_of_Speed said:

So I Am looking to buy a new workstation in the next year or so when prices calm down a little. I want to be able to do some CFD run using openFoam. What do I gain by going to epic vs threadripper? Does having two CPU's double my RAM availability? Does Intel have anything comparable in this space? I know it is recommended to have 5-6GB of RAM per CPU core.

 

Normally I run stuff at work on a HPC using around 600-1000 cores and don't think too much about the hardware. With that it still take around 12-24 hours to run.

 

Now I don't expect to have that level of performance, but I am interested in seeing what I can do in the $10k budget or so.

 

I realize this is now an older (just short of 6 months) thread, but for the sake of search ability, you're currently best off maximizing using external accelerated solvers such as the PETSC framework and it's solvers.

it supports a much wider set of solvers, and those solvers are available for cuda, Hip, Sycl etc.

They also tend to push updated code for performance uplifts multiple time per quarter.

Even without GPU I've seen net uplifts of over 2x in total compute time for the same solver types (and matching results) just by using the PETSC AVX2, AVX512 and intel KML plugins.