Operating System for AMD EPYC Workstation
 

I am thinking about buying an AMD workstation with 2 EPYC 7401 CPUs. I will use it to run parallel Fluent most of the time. What I am not sure is what operating system I should install. I prefer Windows 10 or Windows server, but not sure if AMD EPYC system under Windows system performs as well as under Linux system. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Could you use it as a headless Linux box that you send you jobs too? That way, the Windows overhead is not using up resources of you workhorse?

You should install linux in it because AMD EPYC system needs a lot of resources under windows operating system.

If you go down the Linux route and wish to use a free Linux distribution, then I strongly suggest CentOS for the most hassle free experience (provided you can get support for all your hardware). Also, don't be fooled by the "old" kernel of CentOS 7.x - it has full support for all the latest CPUs, as well as security fixes.



Although CentOS is the only supported free Linux distribution for use with Fluent there are other distributions that can be used with some tricks during installation.



If you are more into Debian/Ubuntu and similar then MX Linux works without any problems (you need some tricks to make the installation work, but it is easy enough). Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux Mint 18.3 also works without any problems aside from the installation tricks needed. Ubuntu 18.04 and later will not work if you will use the computer for meshing, but geometry creation and Fluent works fine. For a headless machine Ubuntu 18.04 works well since you will only be submitting cases to it anyways.



Solus/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Manjaro are a pain to setup with Fluent (OK, they are probably not on the list anyway considering their release model).



If you use the computer as a workstation and not as a pure compute node then Windows may be a valid option. SpaceClaim is not available in the Linux version. But if you do not use SpaceClaim then I say go with CentOS.