Let's have the community help us decide on GPUs!

Hello all!

We had an interesting idea and we hope to get the community involved. Over the course of the next ~3 months, we will have five new systems coming online. Work units from WCG will be emphasized for CPU compute, then E@H for GPU compute (and CPU when WCG does not have any tasks available). Three of the systems will be from Dell (Precision 7865)- two of which will have the Threadripper Pro 5965WX and one will have the Threadripper Pro 5995WX. All three of the Dell systems will have Nvidia workstation GPUs.

I can provide the full specs of these workstations if interested.

The other two systems are being built from donated items and will both feature Threadripper 2970WX CPUs. These were donated from a family last year. This year, we have been working to get these systems built and running. We have had great support from the company be quiet! who donated amazing hardware to build these workstations and then we will be using some grant funding/donations to purchase the motherboards, memory, HDs, and GPUs.

Full specs of the student-built systems:

Case: be quiet! Silent Base 802 

PSU: be quiet! Dark Power 12 1000w

CPU: Threadripper 2970WX

Cooling: be quiet! Dark Rock 4 Pro TR Edition and Silent Wings 3 fans.

MB: ASRock Socket TR4 (X399M Taichi). Extremely difficult to find a MB for these CPUs from an approved vendor. If you all have any better ideas, let me know.

Memory: Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2933

HD: WD_BLACK 1TB SN750, or similar. 

Now, for the interesting idea: we have not chosen GPUs for these two systems. We want to run a little bit of an “experiment” with the GPU choices. We will have two identical systems EXCEPT for the GPUs. We want the community to help us decide what would be an interesting comparison. We know the many of the apps on E@H are optimized for Nvidia, but we think it would be interesting to have one systems Nvidia and the other AMD. We still have a decent amount of grant funding left for the GPUs so let’s assume that the cost is not an issue (relatively speaking- sorry, no H100 or A100!). New GPUs (even not yet released) are fair game. We know these will not be the most powerful systems, and feature some older generation hardware (PCIe gen 3), but still are relatively powerful.

This purchase would take place around Feb. Although we only have select vendors we can purchase from, let’s assume we can get our hands on most GPUs.

We want this to be a genuine comparison of GPUs and their impact on distributed scientific research. You all know better than anyone about GPU compute, so let’s have some fun and do some science! What would be an interesting comparison?