High Core build for simulation work

Njitram · June 23, 2022

Budget (including currency): 10000 eur

Country: Netherlands

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Lattice-Boltzman simulations (high core, medium ram requirements, gpu potentially?)

Other details:

I am tasked for acquiring hardware/server time to run simulations during my PhD to the budget of 10k euro.

We have a HPC cluster here where I can buy core time, but I can also build my own rig/blade and run that locally for my own use/within our group. I am curious how a machine I'd build myself would stack up to the pricing of my university. Of consideration is that power/internet etc are not coming from the same 10k budget so are effectively free.

Prebuilt servers (afaik) usually come with maintenance contracts that are way outside of budget and also not really required for my use-case, but if anyone has any suggestions feel free.

I have no existing parts, except a dummy gpu used for purely video output, although SSH is most likely anyhow.

Effectively I am looking for a general idea of what a server without a GPU would look like and one with. I am aware NVIDIA enterpriuse gpus are incredibly expensive, but an RTX A6000 might be in budget (with a cheap CPU), while a Tesla A100 is outside of it for example. For CPUS Threadripper seems to be an obvious choice, although I think a new series is releasing later this year? A 5995WX might be fitting although i am unsure what the rest of the setup would cost wrt motherboard (~700 eur?), RAM (512 GB DDR4 ECC @ 1k eur?) and anything else i might need.

Im also getting a vague idea buying a singular CPU might not even be possible and only prebuilts from i.e. Lenovo might have it. A system with an A5000, 128GB RAM, and a 5975WX is around 11k, but it has a 5k cost to upgrade to a 995WX which seems much? It's not easy to find individual pricing for these CPUs, which isnt a surprise.

I'm in the process of doing some benchmarks to determine what kind of workload is best, since both CPU and GPU loads exist but its difficult to determine what is best, which is why im looking for some options.