[Beowulf] HPC with CUDA

[Prentice Bisbal]

Raphael,

Not many vendors make servers that support that many GPUs is a single 
chassis. I know for a fact Dell doesn't. I think the HP Proliant servers 
are your best option.

Processor shouldn't be to important in terms of compatibility with the 
GPU. If all the work is going to be done on the GPUs, you could probably 
save some money here. If there's going to be a mix of GPU/CPU work, I'd 
shoot for whatever processor is currently at the pricing 'sweet spot'. 
Talk to your vendor to find out which processor(s)  are currently in the 
sweet spot for pricing.

For RAM, I recommend you have at a minimum least as much main RAM as you 
have RAM in all of your GPUs combined. Since the GTX 780 has 3 GB of 
RAM, you would need a minimum of 15 GB of RAM on the server that will 
have the 5 GTX 780s GPUs. That's not really a lot of RAM these days. I 
think it would be better to have at least double the amount of GPU RAM 
for main ram, so I'd recommend at least 32 GB of RAM in the server with 
5 GPUs, which is still not a lot of RAM by today's standards.  With 
today's multicore processors and 2-4 GB RAM per core as a rule of thumb, 
you are probably already exceeding those RAM recommendations.

An important thing to look into is how many PCI buses are in your 
server. For the server with 5 GPUs, you'll want more than one and you'll 
want to distribute your GPUs as evenly as you can across the busses to 
reduce contention on the PCI bus.

The most important issue is to make sure the server has adequate power 
and cooling capacity. GPUs use a lot of power and give off a lot of 
heat. Without adequate power and cooling within the server chassis, you 
might see some flakey behavior as voltage dips or temperature increases 
too much.

Prentice


On 06/03/2014 09:51 PM, Raphael Verdugo P. wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I need install 5 GPUs(Geforce GTX 780s) in a server and  1 Tesla
> Keppler K40 in other.
>
> ¿ Do they have any recommendation for server HP or Dell?  processor? , RAM?
>
> I review  a  HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Server (1) . Do they any observation?
>
> We will use it with Nvidia CUDA for HPC...
>
> We have the GPUs, I need a server for install it.
>
>
> Regards.
>
>
>
>
> (1) http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=5177957#!tab=specs
>
>