Hello,
I am building a PC for my project in university, has to run calculations using Gaussian and Amber software.
Due to price/performance ratio and also immediate availability in my country I decided to use consumer “gaming” grade hardware.
i9 9900k for CPU compute
2080ti for GPU compute
There are several motherboards available to choose, so I selected ASUS TUF Z390-PLUS GAMING
For Gaussian software we need RedHat Linux, but this motherboard does not officially supports it and our IT is suggesting to find one, which officially supports Redhat,
Can you suggest either supported motherboard, or if it is known to work?
Well most controllers used on those boards are widelly used on several motherboards.
So wenn it comes to linux, generic drivers are added to the kernel,
to make all those base functions work.
And most distro’s have a driver manager build in aswell.
But as far as it comes to linux support from the actual motherboard manufacturers,
on mainstream boards there isn’t really much support from them.
Because their main focus on the Microsoft Windows environment.
On redhat make sure you install the lastest kernel,
to get support for the latest hardware.
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Why are you going Intel? 9900k is $550 1950x is $575 way more compute
Do those apps not scale with cores and are frequency based?
Is pricing far off in your country?
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Well the 9900K of course does has it big clock speed advantage.
Depends on how the said workloads scale with either cores or clocks.
yeah but being a compute and science based program probably scales rather well (could be wrong)
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Yup definitely might be, especially on linux.
Linux does not really seem to suffer much from the scheduling issues with TR,
like windows does.
If your going to roll this kind of hardware in Linux. I will be frank. Fedora which is what red hat pulls from more often then not would be my recommended distribution. The reason I shy away from RHEL is because 1 fedora is easy to support. 2 RHEL is not always very stable when combining unstable packages alongside their stable ones i.e a much newer kernel. Issues can arise though not always. Problem is your combining two ideas that are incompatible… Linux stability and bleeding edge hardware. The way I see it the Fedora distribution is better for this.
The TUF Z390 should fair just find in linux
As far as I am aware the kinds of controller chips used in these boards while customized are often generally the same and widely used. The kernel should support the motherboard just fine unless you are trying to get any specific features working which then requires you to dig into /sys/*
Fedora is binary compatible with RHEL. Keeping up to date with the latest kernel which is what you suggest you may need is easy:
Commands:
sudo curl -s https://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/thl/kernel-vanilla.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/kernel-vanilla.repo
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled kernel-vanilla-mainline
I hope you realize however if you are doing scientific computations that your CPU choice is interesting since compute usually scales better with cores rather then frequency in most scientific workloads. Hence why QUADROS are often clocked lower than their geforce counter parts and have more cuda cores and memory…
Now if your looking for support from the manufacturer… I would say generally forget about it occuring. They can be good and ASUS is good with their workstation boards as is Asrock and MSI but gigabyte not so much. All manufacturers are pretty great about linux support with their server boards. Keep in mind these boards you are looking at are geared towards gamers and as such the features are software driven to which that has only been built for windows generally
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