Server Specifications

[mikemcm22]

Hi all ,

I've seen a few posts about server specifications but it's hard to keep up with stuff changing so often. I need to get a new server, at a reasonable cost, for a few fire modelling projects I do for a fire engineering firm. I am looking to run at most 2 models concurrently, I do 4 or 5 of these projects a year. I am not knowledgeable in this area but have been told I want to be above the minimum specifications in the FDS/Pyrosim manuals. IT has given me a few quotes and right now I am not sure if I need dual processers for what I expect my workload to be. My main goal is to minimize run times while keeping server cost within a reasonable range.

Can anyone provide some guidance on recommended specifications that I can provide to my IT guy? Besides what's specified in the Pyrosim/FDS manuals, I'm not sure what else I should be paying attention too.

I've attached a quote that I think is close to what I need for my expected workload.
Quote_server.pdf

Thank you

[rmcdermo]

Things are changing rapidly, you are right. For this reason, I would recommend you at least consider cloud computing services. There are several out there that know FDS well. For example,

https://www.sabalcore.com/

https://cloudhpc.cloud/

[drjfloyd]

High performance machines are not cheap, as your quote shows, and there are additional costs in maintaining them. Unless you will have high utilization (which at 4-5 projects a year does not seem to be the case), it may be cheaper/easier to just buy time on the cloud. At $32 K you could buy a lot of time on a cloud service. There are a number of providers that have turnkey solutions for FDS.

[mikemcm22]

Thanks, I have looked into this a bit but I don't think upper management will go for it (even if it makes more sense cost wise). We had our last server for 8 year so my goal is to find something that will last 5, that 32k price was for two machines also and Im just looking for one.

[drjfloyd]

The machine you have in the quote is a decent machine. With 48 physical cores you should be able to run a couple of decent sized jobs at one time and not have them take forever. If you have a litle more budget there is a 32 core Xeon Gold CPU.

[johodges]

I would say your RAM/core is a bit low. I have never had a problem with FDS with 4 GB RAM/physical core, but you are at 2.7 GB/core right now. That will probably have performance impacts, particularly if you are running multiple jobs.

[drjfloyd]

I wouldn't go lower with RAM. With a 128 Gb total, by the time windows is done being greedy you will have ~100 Gb for simulations or ~2 Gb per core. FDS now is in the range of 2 - 4 GB per million cells. 2 Gb per core would mean the largest job would be around 0.5 to 1 million cells per core or 24 to 48 million cells total. What are the largest jobs you are running now in terms of the number of grid cells? I think you would want the new machine to give you a sizeable increase over current jobs.

[mikemcm22]

@drjfloyd It varies but one of the last jobs was 9 meshes with most being 200-250k cells each so say 2 million.