<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">1 core on AMD is NOT equivalent to 1 core on Intel. For the sort of number crunching we do in image processing (floating point math), AMD is way behind per core. AMD was the clear leader about 10 years ago, but since Intel’s core 2 duo series, AMD has been playing catch-up. They can still be cost effective for web services, etc, but for number crunching, even if you get fewer cores you will get more bang for the buck with Intel. Generally the companies understand this, so it takes 1.5-2x more AMD cores to equal the compute power of a Xeon, and Xeon system costs will be close to 1.5 to 2x more expensive per core for an assembled computer.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I keep a page for EMAN users with current computer recommendations. My group manages about 2000 cores of cluster computing (5 different generations), so we pay fairly careful attention to these things. I expect in terms of computer purchasing, advice for EMAN will hold quite well for Relion, Frealign, etc.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/FAQ/Computer" class="">http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/FAQ/Computer</a></div><div class=""><br class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">There is very little reason to pay the significant premium for a Quadro card. You can get much better bang for the buck if you want to do GPU computation. The ONLY thing that the Quadro can do that consumer-grade cards cannot is Windowed frame-interleaved stereo 3D. If you buy a passive stereo monitor (using unpowered polarized glasses) many programs can do very effective stereo with any graphics card at all (like Chimera). </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The biggest thing to take into account in the movie-mode era is disk performance. Many compute operations can become disk speed limited quite easily. A single traditional hard drive can give ~150 MB/sec. A single SSD can give as high as 500-600 MB/sec for mainstream cards, but they are more expensive, and have somewhat poor durability for heavy write loads. A good inexpensive solution is to put 8 traditional 4TB drives in a case supporting hot-swapping with a PCIE RAID controller. This can give throughputs of ~1.5 GB/sec to the local computer, for a very modest cost.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">See the page above for more...<br class=""><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><div class=""><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">----------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">Steven Ludtke, Ph.D.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">Professor, Dept of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol. (<a href="http://www.bcm.edu/biochem" class="">www.bcm.edu/biochem</a>)</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">Co-Director National Center For Macromolecular Imaging <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(<a href="http://ncmi.bcm.edu" class="">ncmi.bcm.edu</a>)</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">Co-Director CIBR Center <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(<a href="http://www.bcm.edu/research/cibr" class="">www.bcm.edu/research/cibr</a>)</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class="">Baylor College of Medicine<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Courier; " class=""><a href="mailto:sludtke@bcm.edu" class="">sludtke@bcm.edu</a></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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<br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 7, 2014, at 6:07 PM, Hernando J Sosa <<a href="mailto:hernando.sosa@einstein.yu.edu" class="">hernando.sosa@einstein.yu.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Dear EM users,<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><o:p class=""> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">We have some money to spend (<10K) in a personal workstation mainly to be used for number crunching and single particle analysis. I came across this system (see below) made by a company called Thinkmate.<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Does anybody have experience with this company? <o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Any comments on the system ?<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><o:p class=""> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">As configured it has 64 cores (4 x 16) and 128 GB of RAM<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><o:p class=""> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">I chose AMD Opteron over Intel as it seems to produce the best price/performance but I may be wrong.<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""> <o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Any comments suggestions are welcomed.<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><o:p class=""> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Thanks<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><o:p class=""> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class="">Hernando<o:p class=""></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" class=""><span id="cid:image001.png@01CFFABD.D0E623A0"><image001.png></span><o:p class=""></o:p></div></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">_______________________________________________</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">3dem mailing list</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><a href="mailto:3dem@ncmir.ucsd.edu" style="color: purple; text-decoration: underline; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">3dem@ncmir.ucsd.edu</a><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><a href="https://mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/3dem" style="color: purple; text-decoration: underline; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class="">https://mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/3dem</a></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></div></body></html>