Workstation for CFX Post-Processing
 

Hi everybody,

I am currently working on a Xeon 2x E5-2637 v3 3.7 GHz Quad Core with 128 GB RAM (8x16 GB 2133 MHz). When I use all of our 8 HPC Ansys CFX licenses, this PC is quite busy ;)

A student would like to do his master's thesis with us. For his calculations, he would use the OpenFOAM cluster of his university and needs a desktop PC (running Linux) in our office for setting things up and post-processing.

I pitched the idea to my boss that we get him a decent workstation for his thesis now and I will use this workstation for my post-processing in CFX after he is done.

Which setup would you suggest? Is one Quad Core CPU enough? How much RAM?
Budget should be under 4000 €uros.

Thank you for your suggestions!

Regards,
Maxim

Here's one offer that I got:

Xeon E5-1630 v3 3,7GHz Quad-Core
64GB RAM (4x16GB DDR4 ECC 2133MHz)
nVidia K2200 4GB
Samsung SSD 250GB
2x2TB HDD

That sounds good to me. What do you think?

Looks like a reasonable build for a post-processing workstation.
You should make sure the mainboard has 8 DIMM slots for RAM upgrades.
If you have some money to spare, you could think about getting SSDs instead of or in addition to HDDs. A decent 1TB SSD will only cost you around 300$.

Thank you Alex for your input. I will make sure that the mainboard has enough slots for a RAM upgrade in the future.
You're right - the prices of the big SSDs went down a lot the past year - I will discuss a bigger SSD with my boss.

If you are going to do parralel meshing with more than 4 blocks in the mesh, you should consider the Xeon E5-1650 v3, which has 6 cores at almost the same clock speed.