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Help me specify a $1000 server

R

RevMen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 22, 2004
Messages
460
Hello again, HF. You did me good the last time I asked for build advice. I love the machine I built and am very happy for the price I paid.

I need help with another machine I'm building for a very different purpose. It'll be a machine that only does calculations as part of a distributed system. Do you call that a server? I guess so.

There are plenty of pre-made units out there, but of course there's no fun in that. I've never built a server like this so I don't know where to start (except here).

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

It will be a running a node.js worker script in a number of threads equal to the number of cores as part of a distributed calculation system. It will not serve content, only do calculations.

I suspect core count is more important than clock speed, but I don't know that yet. Both are important. 16GB of memory should be sufficient, but more could be better.

I'm very interested in ARM but I don't think that's practical yet.

This machine will be part of a business I am building and will be in my house for the foreseeable future, so quiet and low-power options are worth considering (but not if it means major reductions in performance).

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

$1000 all-in, but that's based on how much I have, not how much I expect things to cost. This may be a very unrealistic number.

3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.

Northern Colorado, USA. Only physical stores with parts available are Best Buy and Office Depot. Much prefer Amazon for ordering (love that Prime!)

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.

Chassis
Power supply
Motherboard
Memory
Processor
SSD

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

No re-used parts. All new.

6) Will you be overclocking?

Probably not.

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?

Will run headless, so no monitor.

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

Sometime in the next 2-3 months.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.

Possibly multi-processor support.
On-board video would be nice for set-up

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?

64-bit Linux
 
Is there a real need for computational power?

Does it scale well with more cores?
 
There is a real need for computational power, yes. It has to run a batch of search algorithms that could be as large as 100,000.

It does scale well with more cores. Although any given search is likely to depend on a few preceding searches, the number of them that can be run in parallel will probably be in the hundreds.
 
3 haswell nucs would get you 6-cores, 12 threads of high single core perf. Not server grade really, needs ECC and such but it's a start. I think SpeedyVV is on to something.

for what it's worth I'm in the process of acquiring a 4P opteron system running 4 AMD 6374s. Getting the mobo and the cpu's for 800 shipped. Granted it's above your budget and AMD doesn't have intel's single perf performance but it's cheap.
 
So raw IPC performance is still needed correct? That's in addition to multiple cores, correct?
 
price versus performance you won't be able to beat a dell t5500 or hp z800 workstation. They are a couple years old, but you can get 12 cores and 24 threads for under 600$. That is un-beatable. If you are building your own machine, you'll likely get 4 cores 8 threads and 16 gb ram for 1000$.

It may not be as fun as building your own, but those t5500's and z800's are unbelievably flexible, you can get up to i believe 188gb of ram.
 
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