[diegoc]

Hello to everyone,

I'm new in CFD area and I want to buy a computer for CFD simulation. I've been reading some post to learn and select the approiate build. The simulation will contain between 5 to 12M of cells (it is for a vertical axis wind turbine simulations). The specifications selected were the following:

- Dual Intel Xeon 4210 2.2GHz-3.2GHz (10Cores/20Subprocess each one) and a memory speed of 2400MHz.
- 96GB (6x16GB) DD4 2933MHz DIMM ECC Registered 2CPU Memory.
- M.2 256GH SSD.
- 4TB 7200RPM SATA 3.5.
- NVIDIA Quadro P4000 8GB FH 4DP GFX.


Can anyone comment me if this build is OK? or I may change something? Please. My budget is between 4k~6K€.

Thank very much, I will appreciate a lot the help.
Best Regards,

[flotus1]

Which software do you use, which operating system, and how many parallel licenses do you have? I should include that question in my signature.

Your current setup could be greatly improved by using 12 instead of 6 DIMMs to fill all memory channels. Spending money on faster RAM than the CPUs support makes little sense. And you could probably save a lot of money on the GPU.
A much faster configuration in the 6000€ range would be based on 2 AMD Epyc CPUs, e.g. the 7302. You can configure it here in case you don't build it yourself: https://www.deltacomputer.com/d20z-uln-zn.html

[diegoc]

Hello flotus1,

I'm using OpenFoam on Ubuntu 18.04. About the parallel licence I really don't know how to answer this, but, what I can tell you is that I'm doing parallel simulations.

So much thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. I was using the website that you provide me and now I have this configuration:

- Dual AMD Epyc 7302 3.0GHz-3.3GHz (16Cores/32Subprocess each one) and a memory speed of 3200MHz.
- 128GB (16x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz RDIMM.
- M.2 256GB SSD.
- 2TB SATA 3.5.
- NVIDIA Quadro P2000 5GB GDDR5.

It is okay? The tab that I don't understand is the "Controller" tab, I was reading about it and it says that devices are to used to manage a server, right?

So much thanks,
Best regards,

[flotus1]

With OpenFOAM, you don't need to worry about licenses, since you can use as many cores as you want.
On Linux with OpenFOAM you are probably using Paraview for post-processing.
I can highly recommend the AMD RX 570 8GB as a graphics card. It is faster than Quadro P2000, has more memory and costs less.
And in my opinion, the AMD driver causes less headache compared to the Nvidia driver on Linux.
You don't need any additional controller cards. The motherboard provides more than enough I/O to connect everything in your configuration.

Apart from the GPU, the configuration seems reasonable. I would probably use a larger SSD (in the range of 500GB) and definitely a larger and/or more hard drives. But you know best how much storage you need locally.

[diegoc]

Hi flotus1,

Excellent, I really appreciate and I'm very grateful due to all the advices and the orientation that you gave me, also your time for explain and help me!

That's correct, I'm using Paraview for post-processing the results. I already made the changes in the configuration and I'm ready to acquire the machine thanks to your recommendations.

Have a good day,
Best regards,