[evcelica]

Geez, a little sensitive are we? I didn't go crying and running away when you gave me your pompous attitude and acted like I know nothing:

Originally Posted by Daveo643

It's unfortunate that is doesn't work for you, but I don't run Mechanical and neither does the original poster of this thread. I'm going to keep trying and waiting for an authoritative answer on this. Thank you anyway.

That slightly overclocked machine shouldn't account for it being 60% faster than the Tesla. Any one of the upper end Sandy-Bridge E based CPUs should beat the Tesla in that benchmark.

Some guys at my work run Teslas with ANSYS, so I've seen their real world performance or lack thereof in certain cases. I'm sorry, but you come here and recommend something very expensive based on no personal experience, and just some marketing pamphlets you found. Then you get mad at me and stomp off for urging people to think about the real world performance and applications before making such a purchase? Fine, Sayonara buddy.

[kyle]

For what it's worth, I agree with evcelica, and WOW Daveo643 is a sensitive one.

The software to make GPU's a good choice just is not there yet. It seems to me that they show well with certain simulations on structured meshes where you can efficiently organize the simulation in memory, but they are a poor investment for the types of simulations that most of us are doing. You may be able to eek out 1.5x speedup on certain cases, but it often comes at 3x the cost. If you are writing research code for DNS flow in a square channel, then it might make sense to invest in a GPU for the computations. I don't see how it makes sense for anyone solving industrial problems.

The fastest machines for traditional CFD on unstructured meshes use the i7 CPUs with the x79 chipset and high speed memory. As stated earlier in this thread, this is because this is the most memory bandwidth per core available.

[HMN]

Thanks evcelica for linking me to this discusion.

I had exactly the same question in other post and now it's clear: There's no support at all for the GForce GPUs and probably never will be. I don't really understand why. They are not so powerful and have less memory (2+GBytes) as the Quadro or Tesla but they could be a solution in cases where there's no much money to invest.

Perhaps there's agreements to support only that hardware... so they can sell it for a higher cost.

[evcelica]

I thought this was hilarious and would like to share it.

I was reading one of the marketing pamphlets Daveo643 posted: Boost your productivity through HPC (pdf)

On slide 19 one "customer" of ANSYS and their HPC and GPU solutions is analyzing 3D glasses and says:

“
By optimizing our solver selection and workstation configuration,
and including GPU acceleration, we’ve been able to dramatically
reduce turnaround time from over two days to just an hour. This
enables the use of simulation to examine multiple design ideas and
gain more value out of our investment in simulation.
”


I'm thinking what kind of piece of crap computer did they have before this 77x speedup? They say they upgraded "solver selection and workstation configuration, and including GPU acceleration" so I'm thinking these results are total B.S. and aren't comparable at all, they obviously compared a single core of the biggest P.O.S. computer solving out of core and disk thrashing to a high performance cluster just to make the comparison look good.... then I look at who the quote is from:

-Berhanu Zerayohannes, Senior Mechanical Engineer, NVIDIA

Ha Ha HA..
An NVIDIA engineer saying that NVIDIA Tesla GPUs gave him 77x speedup!!!!

REALLY?!?, marketing at its worst!