PC GAMESS/Firefly-related discussion club

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Denis Zavelev
denis.zavelev@gmail.com

>I built a PC similar to what you describe a few months ago. I decided to use the i7 920 because it can be overclocked to 3 GHz without any problem. I did buy a large heat sink, the V10  http://www.ninjalane.com/reviews/cooling/cm-v10http://www.ninjalane.com/reviews/cooling/cm-v10, which also cools the RAM.

Does your system work OK in case of heavy tasks that last e.g. several days?


>I chose a slightly cheaper motherboard, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2. I spent some money on better memory, SuperTalent WA160UX6G9 (12 GB total), which is PC3-12800 9-9-9-28. The WA160UX6G7 is even faster with 7-7-7-28 but 50% more expensive. Both types come with large heat sinks.

What means "better"? Faster, more reliable?


>The system needed a supersized case, I used the Thermaltake Armor http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1277&ID=1404http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1277&ID=1404 (and no, I didn't choose it because of the blue LEDs :).

Of course, I understand that big case is needed.


>I have a 700 W power supply. If you intend to upgrade to multiple graphics cards and run CUDA version of Firefly (when it is out...) I would get a 1000+ W PS.
>I have six HDs, all Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 with 32 MB cache, one 1TB for the system disk and four 750GB for cache, and a 500 GB for backup on eSATA, all SATA II. The 750 GB is a 2-platter 3-head design, the 1 TB is 2-platter 4-head (faster). The smaller 500 GB is 1-platter 2-head and much slower for sustained transfer rates. The cache disks are separated (not RAID), each for one core.

Are you sure that 700W is enough for all those HDDs and coolers?


>I looked at 10,000 rpm Western Digital drives, but they have a high failure rate and are very noisy.

Noise is not real problem, I suppose. Seagate HDDs are also not silent.


>The alternative here are SDDs and the fastest can saturate the SATA II channel.

First of all, they are really expensive (even in comparison with SAS). Then I haven't seen SDDs bigger than 128Gb. Usually each cache is not much than 10Gb, but I heard that sometimes one of caches can be 200Gb or even bigger. And afaik SDDs can be incomparably less reliable than usual HDDs on such heavy duties.


>The system is dual boot, Vista64 and Fedora 10 64-bit. I use Vista64 for Firefly (mostly DFT work). I need the Fedora for US-GAMESS (for coupled clusters).

Damn, it's sad but it seems that I'll also have to use Vista64. :(
It's no problem to use some 64bit linux distribution (currently I prefer Ubuntu though AltLinux is also pretty except the stupid installer), but it doesn't work with any 64-bit MPI implementation, so we have to use only ~3.3Gb of memory.

>Don't know about the ECC issue, my RAM is non-ECC.
Maybe it's just really good RAM, who knows.
BTW, what do you usually compute using DFT?

>I like the i7 more than Phenom.
Maybe it's just a question of "religion". For usual cheap desktops I prefer to use AMD, but if it concerns the performance of the workstation, of course "religion" is not the criterion.

Anyway, thanks for you answer!