[cegan09]

I'm looking to build a budget setup to run openFOAM, and I'm getting number blind looking at different CPU models. I'm hoping someone can demystify the specs I should be focusing on.

I need to run the same simulation many times with the object rotated a little between each run. My hope was that I could build something that would let me run a couple of those in parallel, either by setting up a few virtual machines each running one simulation, or just running several studies on the same one (I'm still learning which approach is better, feel free to tell me if there is a better way).

Still learning the lingo, but I believe when describing the size of simulations it's the max local cells setting of the mesh that gets used? Assuming I've got that right, I've been running 20M, but have been experimenting with less to see where results start to diverge too much. If I can build something that lets me run the larger simulations that'd be great however.

Right now I'm using a server that's basically 10 years old with two E5-2670 8 core CPUs and 48gigs of RAM. It's setup with a free ESXI license which limits me to 8 processors per VM. I do have a valid license of windows server 2016 I can switch to, or something like proxmox, or just run the OS direct on the hardware.



Budget and starting points.
I'd like to stay at or under $3k. My initial research says that puts me in early gen EPYC territory. My plan was to use a supermicro H11DSi V2 and start with Naples generation (7xx1) CPUs, with the option to upgrade to Rome in a year or two as those come down in price. Where I'm stuck is trying to make sure I pick the right CPU for the application. I'm just number blind at this point. I'd been looking at 32-core variants with the idea that I can setup 4 simulations at once running 16 cores each. But I'm open to being educated on if that's not the best way.

I know that memory bandwidth is just as or more important than the CPU, so I want to make sure I get that right as well.



Hopefully I got all the info in here that's required. Please tell me if I missed some needed info, or if I just blatantly missed a thread with these answers already. Thank you.