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<div>Hello Steven,</div>
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<div>just my two bits about the Quadro vs. Consumer-GPU. There is one more thing that might or might not be relevant. The Quadro cards can be used as a Compute Device, for example via CUDA or OpenCL in a remote Desktop or server environment. For a personal workstation this is not an issue, because as long as you are logged in locally, consumer cards can do the same and a Titan will give lots more compute power for the same money. But for a 10K machine there might be the idea to use it as compute server for several people, build slave or similiar. Then Hernando would need to go for Quadro, because the relevant features (for example operate the card without a monitor attached) are disabled for the consumer devices, and he will have trouble to access the GPU from a build slave environment or via remote desktop. This is all releated to Windows, I have no experience how it behaves on Linux, though.</div>
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<div>best</div>
<div> Tim</div>
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<div style="margin:0 0 10px 0;"><b>Gesendet:</b> Samstag, 08. November 2014 um 02:24 Uhr<br/>
<b>Von:</b> "Steven Ludtke" <sludtke@bcm.edu><br/>
<b>An:</b> "Hernando J Sosa" <hernando.sosa@einstein.yu.edu><br/>
<b>Cc:</b> "3dem@ncmir.ucsd.edu" <3dem@ncmir.ucsd.edu><br/>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [3dem] Workstation</div>
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<div>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.
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<div>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>
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<div><a href="http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/FAQ/Computer" target="_blank">http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/FAQ/Computer</a></div>
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<div>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>
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<div>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>
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<div>See the page above for more...
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<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;">Steven Ludtke, Ph.D.</div>
<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;">Professor, Dept of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol. (<a href="http://www.bcm.edu/biochem" target="_blank">www.bcm.edu/biochem</a>)</div>
<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;">Co-Director National Center For Macromolecular Imaging <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(<a href="http://ncmi.bcm.edu" target="_blank">ncmi.bcm.edu</a>)</div>
<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;">Co-Director CIBR Center <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(<a href="http://www.bcm.edu/research/cibr" target="_blank">www.bcm.edu/research/cibr</a>)</div>
<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;">Baylor College of Medicine<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0.0px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: normal;font-size: 12.0px;line-height: normal;font-family: Courier;"><a href="sludtke@bcm.edu" target="_parent">sludtke@bcm.edu</a></div>
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<div>On Nov 7, 2014, at 6:07 PM, Hernando J Sosa <<a href="hernando.sosa@einstein.yu.edu" target="_parent">hernando.sosa@einstein.yu.edu</a>> wrote:</div>
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<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Dear EM users,</div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">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.</div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Does anybody have experience with this company? </div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Any comments on the system ?</div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">As configured it has 64 cores (4 x 16) and 128 GB of RAM</div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">I chose AMD Opteron over Intel as it seems to produce the best price/performance but I may be wrong.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Any comments suggestions are welcomed.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Thanks</div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-size: 11.0pt;font-family: Calibri , sans-serif;">Hernando</div>
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