For anyone asking, that is the configuration I have at work. The little buddy that helps out to determine when and what stuff breaks via simulations.
So what happend to high-end then? Last time I checked, the legendary GTX Titan was the best one could get and some i7 was considered the best part one could get. For workstations AMD and Nvidia were trading blows to settle with the W9100 32GB and M6000 24GB. The most RAM I ever saw in a single workstation was 2048GB of dual ranked ECC holyness. Now it seems that everything slightly above mid-range is considered and hyped to be "high-end" or "top of the line". I think it is adorable what of that silicon junk is considered high end when clearly it is not. Maybe my workstation is only midrange now. Does anyone know if Intel has a board available to fit 4 of their overpriced 22 core Xeons? Anyway, I will think about this a little more tomorrow when watching my workstation slowly chew away at massive simulation tasks.
Well I guess that the definition of "top end" in the computer industry is never something absolute since tech develops at a pretty high rate still. Yeah, that system is not even close to be the real top end but might be a top end machine for someone running is own business and can afford "just" a 10K $ machine. Also the watercooled CPU, the LEDs and all that fancy makes obvious that's just a showcase build more than anything else. I that term just slipped off is mouth, that's it.
P.S. I was reading through the spec sheet of the machine you have at work and I had a bit of a laugh when I saw the "nano wireless adapter" just below a two 10G PCI adapter lol
First of all , I KNOW NOTHING about the computing you are doing.But I am building a high performance machine but for a different purpose( 40 core). There are Proprietary supermicro 4 cpu boards/systems and use xeons e5 4xxx series for 4 socket mobos, you cant use random xeons and stick them together. some do 1 cpu config some only 2 etc. I wouldnt expect to find anything in atx form ,no way you could pack it 2 cpu is max if you want something in universal form factor..And than you pay extra for the solutions hehe which are ordered through distributors so you pay extra again for support and you pay a lot.Also there is a price gap between server and workstation stuff. Titans black or Z still have nice double precission that was killed in titan x if that is needed.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon7000/#2011 . Manufacturers will make sure that the equipment you use might seem to be outdated reasonably soon.Every year they give a reason to upgrade.The goal is to get what you are going to use and not to pay extra for features not used . hehe like a 20k usd ssds :)With a single machine power and heat might not be a problem but with many it might be. Upgrades would make things faster but the question is how much is time worth for you :D Hardware needs to earn money and be busy to justify its price .If you are wasting time because the hardware is lagging behind you are also wasting money.When upgrading to something that expensive you have to know how long will it take to recoup the costs of investments, if your hardware is not slowing the work flow there is no need for upgrade.For home use I would go to Ebay ,it is now flooded with used xeons and ES cpus for a fraction of the retail price but no warranty and support like with prebuilt systems.Good for home use .Also xeons are expensive and judge the price scaling with performance scaling yourself hehe :) But at the moment there is no other alternative if you look for something new.
I think High End means different things to different people.To me high end could be a pentium 4 box stuffed with sound cards and phantom power fitted to it and using that as a mixer. It also means my Phenom box because its the nicest thing I own and I cherish it. High end to me also means MIPS, RISC, PowerPC. Huge interconnected workstations all doing a task in a cluster and pressing out giant calculations trying to map out where a star will be or rewriting the Qu'Ran so that people of many languages can read it and see that not everyone is a terrorist.
To Linus...... I honestly have no fucking clue. He puts an i5 in a flatbed case and calls it highend. I just want to beat the shit out of him anyways. To any of the youtubers high end means what they see in advertisements. They are also pulled in these giant advertisements and are told repeatedly that this junk is high end. @Logan and @DeusQain went on that big Nvidia trip remember?That whole brainwashing thing? Hell most of gamers think Nvidia is the best and when you say something about AMD or ATI they scream at the top of their lungs at you.
My last example is a kid I saw in Alaska on YT. To him, high end was getting the last of the powerbook G4's with an ati 9700 and 3 GB of ram hacked in. With that, a 256 GB IDE SSD. He was giving his 800 mhz ibook to his cousin, who had a DOS machine, so to him that ibook was high end. That video was posted last year.
Credit to you, I want to see that 64 core box in action. That sounds absolutely amazing. I want to see it work. That sounds like a dream and for what you do, yeah, thats high end as fuck. But to some stupid kid who doesn't understand what is in his laptop and he only knows theres a sticker that says nvidia optimus on it he will fight to the death to blindly support something he saw on youtube. High end isn't really a definition that everyone can compare because it means different things to them all.
Not sure if you are saying that I'm brainwashed or not.
As far as saying "high end" it's the high end Workstation boards that Gigabyte was showing off.
it's not that we are brainwashed, it's that when you are presented with the flagship workstation board, that is designed to do CAD work and such.
Also, to @CrossCarbon Your supermicro board isn't considered a workstation board, it's a server board. Which changes the game a bit.
Just because you use it as a workstation doesn't change the designation.
One of the server boards that Gigabyte had, that we didn't go over in that video, is a dual CPU socket octa PCI-express board designed for 8 tesla cards.
It's a different tier of hardware with a more specialized product, for a specialized market.
XDXD No! I'm just saying nvidia pulls that super exciting "Hey kids lets go on an adventure!!!!" crap and AMD just has a normal business conference because they are a company. I like professionalism more than impressing people (I come from a business oriented family).
I pointed that out in my post that "High End" means different things to different people for that reason. I guess I missed the thought of tiers XD. I don't think about CAD too often nor specialized tasks but what do I know lol.
Microsofts definition for workstations has expanded with Windows 10 Pro x64 - it can theoretically support 512GB Ram and 256 cores... I digress.
High end workstations will probably be a thing of the past within a few years for many workloads that currently use them. We'll see the cloud providers starting to offer more in the way of options for remote workstations for rendering etc. AWS already have some services of this type. You just pay for the time your workstation is powered up executing a job/simulation and then you shut down again. This leaves you free to work from a decent laptop the rest of the time and save $$$$.
@CrossCarbon Could you see your workloads/simulations being run from AWS/Azure/Digital Ocean in future?
I said myself that it might be a low-end or flatout outdated machine. Just compared to what is praised to be high end, it is way above that. For me the top end is that extreme board you skipped in the video. I would have loved to get some updates on what of the powerful enterprise stuff is out there. All I ever get is a memo that tells us to save everything to the local servers as the workstations undergo some "changes". The hardware tiers are there, sure. They fit the tasks they are designed for but everyone keeps yelling that their i5 and 980ti are the highest end of everything when clearly they are not. All I ask for is for the lines to divide the different functualitys from another.
Those CPUs are not "High-end" at all they are old CPUs and they were peices of shit when they came out and are even more so now. You are way better suited for 3x E5-2670s then the garbage 6378s
I remember one of the new collegues asking that. I do not think so as one month at Digital Ocean would cost the same as buying several of our current workstations.
the purpose a machine is built for is what decides if its high end.... high end for your workstation would not be the same as what you would define for a high end gaming PC, they have different roles. thats like saying an iphone 6s+ is low end because it cant max out AAA games when in reality its a high end device for its purpose .
What should I say. Most comments right now are repetitions with the few questions and ideas people have about my not so exiting job. TBH I expected something a bit more friendly.
Really, I thought DO was pretty cheap. The hourly rate for one of their largest VM's is less than $1. If you only need it on average of 4 hours per working day keeping it switched off at weekends the yearly bill should be less than $1,000. Obviously running that 24/7/365 would be over $7.5k!
They might be cheap but are not the right solution for our task. The largest VM is 1/3 of the cores and ~1/16th of the RAM. I can ask my boss tomorrow.
