Advice on hardware.

steoin

Hey pretty much technically incompetent so excuse the ignorance.

Basically Im looking to get as much processing power and Ram as possible.

I currently own a PowerEdge R610 with 2 Xeon X5650 @2.67GHz with 96gb of ram and was wondering what would be the best option for me to increase the processing power and Ram.

Ideally 512gb of ram would be great, but 256 is a minimum, and I really need to up the processing power.


Its for use with PIO solver, poker Game theory software thats pretty dam intensive, most of the calculations max out cpu usage for a number of days, sometimes longer depending on whats needed.


Would it be possible to purchase another server or two and combine them?
If so would the hardware of the other servers have to match in some ways?

Im not sure what way the cores and threads influence speeds etc, but PIO support are quite helpful so if someone could guide me
I could ask there.

I realise Im a little all over the place here, but any advice would be greatly appreciated, even directions on where to go to find answers.

Berty

A quick look at that system spec says that the motherboard is DDR3 memory and the board can handle up to 192GB of memory.

The CPU could be changed but the board itself won't meet the memory you'd like.

You could upgrade the motherboard and CPU and memory or you could build your own.

Buy something like a Supermicro system with Dual CPUs
Buy CPUs
Buy Memory
Buy SSD for Operating System
Buy some Storage

shanec1928

graphics card will also help if its number crunching

Static M.e.

It sounds like you should be looking at a Cloud platform (Hardware or Software) and build it online in Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web services (Think Servers on the internet you can rent).

You could then scale up as much as you wanted, on the fly, and you only pay for what you use. So you don't pay for downtime on the server, new RAM or equipment.

I wouldn't buy hardware unless there was another reason you need it - like poor or unreliable internet connections.

Fysh

Tbh if you're a single user and have occasional need of that kind of CPU and RAM, cloud is the way to go. If it isn't dreadfully data intensive you could take a local copy of the data (or even the whole vhdx file, if it comes to it) and delete the vm when not in use to save on storage costs. Make sure to check the cost of transferring data out of the virtual environment first if you go for this, downloading a 1TB vhdx won't be free.

Edit: I would also check with other people who run PIO Solver, as the specifications page here describes running it well on a homd desktop, so your current machine should have plenty of heft for it.

steoin

Fysh wrote: »

Tbh if you're a single user and have occasional need of that kind of CPU and RAM, cloud is the way to go. If it isn't dreadfully data intensive you could take a local copy of the data (or even the whole vhdx file, if it comes to it) and delete the vm when not in use to save on storage costs. Make sure to check the cost of transferring data out of the virtual environment first if you go for this, downloading a 1TB vhdx won't be free.

Edit: I would also check with other people who run PIO Solver, as the specifications page here describes running it well on a homd desktop, so your current machine should have plenty of heft for it.

Ive been renting a server with 256 and 2 pretty decent chips for the past few months, and limited by the amount of Ram, yes basic tress are a couple of gb, and many of the saves are around 25gb per tree, but for doing the preflop solves you really are limited by 256gb, it can be worked with though as once complete the ranges can be used to create individual trees.

Ill probably just upgrade the cpus in my current server and 196gb of ram should be loads once I upgrade.

Cheers for all the advice, appreciated.

steoin

shanec1928 wrote: »

graphics card will also help if its number crunching

Thanks Ill look into that.

steoin

Would I be seeing a hugely significant difference upgrading from two Intel Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz to 2 Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33GHz?

Im seeing benchmarks of 11379 vs 13637, and the x5680 is the top chip from what I can tell that is compatible with my current motherboard.

ED E

Are your workloads atypical? Their support page indicates 16GB is enough for the majority.



I wouldnt spend any money upgrading that platform at this point, unless you can get the CPUs for €20/piece.


This board and RAM(Ram as an example)
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/kVNV7W
+
2x something like this:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Xeon-E5-2690-V3-ES-2-4GHz-30MB-12-Core-24Threads-22nm-135W-QEYJ-Processor/332732810947?hash=item4d786bc6c3:g:A7QAAOSwaMtbWU6K

Would be generally much faster. I'm not 100% sure how your software will leverage it but in terms of CPU grunt:
19281 x2 vs 7429 x2 - 2.6x faster

Faster ram, board supports 1TB of it if you need it. 16 slots.

steoin

Cheers really appreciate all the advice.

Well if you are anyway serious using it, then yes you need far more than 16gb. In the discord group and id say 25% of people are using a dedicated server with 256gb of ram.

Some of the guys are using the amazon ones with a few terabytes of ram.
But for basic use yeah 32gb is okay.

ED E wrote: »

Are your workloads atypical? Their support page indicates 16GB is enough for the majority.



I wouldnt spend any money upgrading that platform at this point, unless you can get the CPUs for €20/piece.


This board and RAM(Ram as an example)
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/kVNV7W
+
2x something like this:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Xeon-E5-2690-V3-ES-2-4GHz-30MB-12-Core-24Threads-22nm-135W-QEYJ-Processor/332732810947?hash=item4d786bc6c3:g:A7QAAOSwaMtbWU6K

Would be generally much faster. I'm not 100% sure how your software will leverage it but in terms of CPU grunt:
19281 x2 vs 7429 x2 - 2.6x faster

Faster ram, board supports 1TB of it if you need it. 16 slots.

ZENER

What OS are you running this on ? If it's a desktop OS like Windows 7 then you are limited in the amount of Memory you can run. 

Windows 7 Pro x64 - 192GB
Windows 7 Home Premium x64 - 16GB

Ken