Custom PC for work project

Started by Dieselboy, January 20, 2017, 08:27:11 PM

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Dieselboy

January 20, 2017, 08:27:11 PM
The CEO spoke to me and said I need to get this PC for a project, and we should get two in case there is any issue with just one:

CPU: 2 CPUs; XEON E5-2600 v4 family or similar;
Memory: 128GB;
GPU: 4 x NVIDIA Pascal TITAN X graphics cards;
Motherboard: able to have 4 dual-slot GPUs installed (PCI-E x16); support dual CPU;
Storage: 1TB SSD and 4TB HDD

Basically, I started looking and it looks like the difficult parts are the GPUs and the motherboard. Found some places in the USA where I can get the GPUs from but ran out of time so will continue next week. Because I need to build two of these machines, I need 8 GPUs. This comes to just under $13,000USD for the GPUs alone. On the Nvidia site it says we can order only "2 per customer" :-s

One thing I'm unsure of which I've only just noticed, from the text it looks like the spec is TWO physical CPU sockets. Those CPUs are 10-core, 2.4GHz. This is going to be the most powerful single machine I've ever seen. It even beats our Virtualisation Hosts.
(Our hosts are Cisco B200 M3 servers inside a 5108 Cisco chassis. Running 128GB RAM and 2 x Intel Xeon 6 core / 2GHz - this works out to be 24 threads (2 cpu, * 6 cores * hyperthreading (2) = 24)

deanwebb

#1
January 21, 2017, 08:41:36 AM
What is this project, rendering the next Pixar movie on one box?
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

icecream-guy

#2
January 22, 2017, 10:02:12 AM
Quote from: deanwebb on January 21, 2017, 08:41:36 AM
What is this project, rendering the next Pixar movie on one box?
either that or some serious currency mining
:professorcat:

My Moral Fibers have been cut.

deanwebb

#3
January 23, 2017, 09:24:58 AM
Quote from: ristau5741 on January 22, 2017, 10:02:12 AM
Quote from: deanwebb on January 21, 2017, 08:41:36 AM
What is this project, rendering the next Pixar movie on one box?
either that or some serious currency mining
Or it's for one helluva Pong game!
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

SofaKing

#4
January 23, 2017, 01:20:59 PM
Quote from: deanwebb on January 23, 2017, 09:24:58 AM
Or it's for one helluva Pong game!

My money is on the Pong game ;)
Networking -  You can talk about us but you can't talk without us!

Otanx

#5
January 23, 2017, 04:26:38 PM
I vote for a multi-monitor Microsoft flight simulator setup

http://www.wideview.it/wideview.htm

-Otanx

mmcgurty

#6
January 24, 2017, 08:34:47 AM
Wow!  That is a lot of computing power.  Curious, why Titan X's rather than newer 1080's?

ggnfs000

#7
January 25, 2017, 11:44:19 AM
Have you tried doing any GPU stress testing? I have working on that last few weeks and get pretty good success with gromacs.
However I used older M6 GPU.

Dieselboy

#8
January 28, 2017, 01:41:11 AM
It's for "machine learning". When I asked "wtf is that, then" I was given an example of you know how facebook has facial recognition on your photos? When you upload a photo and it says "would you like to tag Sarah?" Apparently, facebook would have set up a machine learning setup and over time would have learned Sarah's features. Then after implementing it, facebook will then be able to recognise Sarah on photos that have never been seen before. So that kind of thing.

I've specced up 2 x v4 Xeons, giving 30mb cache per cpu and 40 cpu threads per system. We can go higher on cpu cache but we don't know what the benefit is, but obviously more is better?

I really like the motherboard. It has 6 PCI x16 slots, and out of band management / kvm! I'm going to set them up in the comms room where's nice and chilly.

Those GPUs are not yet released in Australia, and there's a limit on the number you can buy from nvidia. Lucky we're registered in usa too :)

I'm already listing secondary projects / things we can do with these boxes if they arent used for their primary reason at any point:

1. need to look into if the motherboards support iscsi boot, so i can set up projects quickly and use snapshots on our Nimble SAN (has SSD cache too on the san)

2. Seeing how quickly our wifi can be broken

3. BOINC

4. Replacing our Cisco UCS chassis
:problem?: :rofl:

deanwebb

#9
January 30, 2017, 09:13:37 AM
5. Providing proof of concept for IPv6 address exhaustion strategies.
Take a baseball bat and trash all the routers, shout out "IT'S A NETWORK PROBLEM NOW, SUCKERS!" and then peel out of the parking lot in your Ferrari.
"The world could perish if people only worked on things that were easy to handle." -- Vladimir Savchenko
Вопросы есть? Вопросов нет! | BCEB: Belkin Certified Expert Baffler | "Plan B is Plan A with an element of panic." -- John Clarke
Accounting is architecture, remember that!
Air gaps are high-latency Internet connections.

Dieselboy

#10
January 30, 2017, 09:15:53 AM
6. how much power is needed to break cryptolocker? we have over 12,000 cuda cores on one system. (I also have some fresh encrypted cryptolocker files friend with food company)

Dieselboy

#11
January 31, 2017, 08:12:16 PM
I specc'd all this up again yesterday. Had to make a spreadsheet to do all the calculations as the GPUs are only available from USA. Before shipping but after converting the GPU costs to AUD it comes in at a nice $28k for 2 systems.

I'll also mention that we can buy 10GB PCI network cards to connect them up to the 10gb network. I could deploy openstack on these later on but doubt virtualisation platforms will even consider the GPUs at all.
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