• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Parallel Programming Machine: Cheapest route to a highest core machine?

O

OldM3ta

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2004
Messages
1,150
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Click to expand...
Parallel programming. Multi-threaded programming. The more cores I can get on a machine, the better. Unsure if hyper-threading is transparent to a programmer. Could be useful. Server systems with two CPU sockets are okay. Plan to have the system on only for compiling and running high-threaded apps.
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
Click to expand...
Ideally $600, but $1000 max
3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
Click to expand...
Austin, Texas, US
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.
Click to expand...
$600-$1000 budget for motherboard, CPU(s), RAM
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Click to expand...
Assume I have a mid sized case, decent power supply, optical drive, hard drive, mouse+keyboard, monitor, O/S.
6) Will you be overclocking?
Click to expand...
No.
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
Click to expand...
24" 1080P
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
Click to expand...
Next three weeks or less.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video? etc.
Click to expand...
Onboard video would be good, not necessary. Linux support is a must.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Click to expand...
I'll be using Arch Linux.


Thanks for your help.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
By the way, I have thought on this on my own. Here is what I came up with:

(1) TYAN S7002G2NR-LE Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5500 Tylersburg Chipset SSI CEB Dual Intel Xeon 5500/5600 Series Server Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151193
$255
(2) Intel Xeon E5606 Westmere-EP 2.13GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117258
$470
(2) Kingston 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139267
$120
======
Total $845
 
That case and mobo will not work together. Did you already buy the case or something?
 
It's a start but I'd recommend something like this:
$605 - AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours Socket G34 CPU + Asus KGPE-D16 SSI EEB Motherboard Combo
$250 - AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours Socket G34 CPU
$86 - 2 x Kingston KVR1333D3N9K2/8G 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM
-----
Total: $941 plus tax and shipping

The above gets you 16 cores rather than the 8 cores of the Intel build.
 
If you just want absurd numbers of cores, Ebay has brand new 6-core Opterons (2419) for $29, and I've seen them go down to $17 (they were $17 2 days ago).
Stare at Ebay and find a used Supermicro Socket F board and for about $120 you have the core of your system
 
You don't have to have a crazy number of cores to run a crazy number of threads.

The only reason to build/buy a system with a high core count would be to specifically test thread scaling.. and even then you can get a pretty good idea with only a 4-core CPU.

IF you really want a setup that can handle huge numbers of threads doing stuff all at the same time, look into GPU programming.
 
Thanks, Danny. I appreciate your time.

Great suggestion, bwang! That's a great route to save A LOT of money. I'm going to investigate.

Thanks, Cyclone3d. I plan sticking strictly to CPU programming for now and want more than four cores to operate on simultaneously.
 
Looks like a Dual Socket F board that supports six-core Istanbul Opterons are almost impossible to find for under $200.
 
bwang said:
If you just want absurd numbers of cores, Ebay has brand new 6-core Opterons (2419) for $29, and I've seen them go down to $17 (they were $17 2 days ago).
Stare at Ebay and find a used Supermicro Socket F board and for about $120 you have the core of your system
Click to expand...

So unfortunately, it seems that finding a dual socket F board that has support for hex-core out-of-the-box is next to impossible. I could order a ton of boards and try it if any fail, but the promising boards themselves seem to be hovering around $400.

While the processors are dirt cheap, this would be a gamble, and I'm not sure if it's one I want to take. Unless you have further suggestions on a dual socket F that works with hex-core processors on the 1207 socket.
 
I'm a self employed developer and most of the work I've been doing for the last five+ years has been multi-threaded and parallel programming. I does not take anything special hardware-wise to do this. Much of my development has been on a virtual machine with only a single core assigned to it. If a developer is good about following best practices, having one or eight cores will not matter in the least on the development machine.

The only scenario that comes to mind where purchasing specific hardware for this kind of endeavor would be if you were testing and then subsequently tweaking a sophisticated multi-threaded application to squeeze out the smallest of gains.

But for general multi-thread and parallel programming development, anything modern will do fine.
 
JRS said:
Much of my development has been on a virtual machine with only a single core assigned to it.
Click to expand...

How have you tested and benchmarked multi-threaded code that runs in parallel with only a single-core VM?
 
MeTaSpARKs said:
How have you tested and benchmarked multi-threaded code that runs in parallel with only a single-core VM?
Click to expand...

The same way I test/benchmark on a multi-core system. Most bottlenecks and performance problems show themselves regardless of the number of cores/threads available. Sure, I run tests on higher end machines to try to make sure I'm taking advantage of the hardware as much as possible, but that is for that last bit of performance tweaking.

It is the basic design of the software and using best practices that will drive most performance and benchmarks. If those are "bad", that will show up even on the most unsophisticated platforms. I've seen contention on a single core. I've seen cross-threaded problems on a single core.

With my work, everything I've built is ultimately test on my clients' servers, so I don't have to have my own systems to do that last bit of testing. However, I've never ran into an issue where I though "I would not have done that if I had my own 12 core system".

I'm not saying it is not possible to take advantage of a dual cpu system, just that it is not an absolute necessity. If you haven't done much multi-threaded/parallel programming, then I would recommend first writing a decent piece of software using those techniques (this should be at least a 500-1000 hour effort), make sure it runs well on whatever hardware you have and when you hit that point, then look at the dual cpu system build.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top