Building a Workstation (32GB of RAM or More)

diggƒreak

Limp Gawd
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Jan 8, 2006
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I just started working on a project in which we hope to compute all eigenvalues of a 1,000,000 by 1,000,000 matrix. With current hardware, we hope that we can do it by brute force without distributed computation.

This is the first time that I have built a computer for true computing such as this. I have a few questions.

Do I need to get ECC Memory? Do I need to get a Xeon?

What is the maximum amount of memory that I can get onto one board?
I'm very much considering a dual socket board.
 
Best to have a big name do it like IBM or HP or DELL less headache and more compute time die to less downtime.
 
If you want that much RAM you need a server or workstation board. Most i7 boards only support up to 24GB of RAM. I would say dual socket Xeon board would be your best bet for that much ram.
 
go Magny Corpus :p (the 12 core from AMD :p )...

as for how much ram, it depends on the board, as said i7 board will do 24gb, however alot of server boards(dual socket) is 64gb I believe?
 
OK, I'm almost ready to purchase. Comments?
Yeah just one Westmere for now.

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Btw, the max memory you can currently buy for a board is 192GB in 18 slots and 8GB modules.
 
With a system using a lot of RAM for one program, you will see a noticeable difference in performance with faster RAM.

On RAM intensive tests, the system in my sig when running at 3.8Ghz and DDR3-1900 beats my brother's system running at 4.2Ghz with DDR3-1600.

I am not sure if you can find faster than DDR3-1333 registered DIMMS, or even if the dual socket boards are able to run the RAM at higher than 1333, but I would definitely look into it.
 
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