My dad needs a PC

[Darcassan]

I have some experience building PC's, but they've all been for either gaming or general use, so when my father asked me to give him a list of hardware for a workstation for processing vector math, I came up a little short on recommendations , but I also know where to obtain answers; you guys 'n' gals!  Here's the original message from my dad:

 

"

Hi Steve-o,

   I wonder if you can help me with something going on at work.

 

We need to buy a PC that can host a GPU for performing lots of vector mathematics.

We are executing something called 'convolution' on huge data sets stored on an external RAID.

We have seen the GPUs that are available, the best being the NVidia Tesla K80.

The external RAID will be one our company is making, connected to the PC with PCIe gen3x8 cabling.

The Tesla K80 is PCIe gen3x16, I believe.

The thing I am worried about with buying a PC is this: will we able to get multi-terabytes of data off the RAID and into the GPU and back out again, fast enough to keep the GPU busy?

 

My question to you is this: what chip set, what motherboard, what backplane, how much RAM, what kind of RAM, etc etc etc should we buy to maximize throughput over PCIe, from the RAID to GPU and back again?

"

 

Any help you all may be able to lend would be very much appreciated.

 

-Steve

[Himommies]

Judging by this you would need MAssive amounts of Pcie Ssds and probaly ECC ram,so you would have to go X99 

[Energycore]

6 minutes ago, Darcassan said:

The thing I am worried about with buying a PC is this: will we able to get multi-terabytes of data off the RAID and into the GPU and back out again, fast enough to keep the GPU busy?

A single lane of PCI-E 3.0 can move 1GB per second of data. 8 lanes will do 8GB/s, shouldn't be a problem

[Himommies]

I just learned what vector math is.My poor brain

[NTDaws]

PCI-E Drives for sure you'll me moving in total about 8GB/s if thats 8 lanes of course. Make sure you go with Error Correcting Memory and X99

[NTDaws]

Also your gonna need a very and I mean a very powerful x99 CPU for that, The Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 should handle this.

[Darcassan]

I had a feeling Xeon would be the direction to go, and super fast NVMe storage; thanks for the feedback so far!

[NTDaws]

Ill make you a pc part picker

[Energycore]

3 minutes ago, Dawson Wehage said:

Also your gonna need a very and I mean a very powerful x99 CPU for that, The Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 should handle this.

A 2680 v4 should do honestly.

[NTDaws]

-removed-

[NTDaws]

nvm it will be fine woop

[Energycore]

Just now, Dawson Wehage said:

nvm it will be fine woop

It's still 28 threads of broadwell-E lol

And 35MB L3 Cache, geez

[NTDaws]

You know your qualified in doing this it looks but do go with PCI-E storage and a tesla, good luck pal.

[wlupoli]

I might be able to help with a few tweaks from you and this pc should be just fine: 

You will probably want to remove one of the pcie cards for a tesla or quadro. 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/R8XqPs