VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 20 2008 - 15:34:52 CDT

Michael,
  If you're building a new machine for CUDA/GPU work, I'd suggest trying
to get a motherboard that's based on PCI express 2.0, and I'd make sure you
get a power supply with the 8-pin PCIe power connectors, since all of the
new GPU boards have already begun to require them...
The PCIe 2.0 motherboards can transfer over 5 gigabytes/sec to and
from the GPU, the best of the PCIe 1.x motherboards can only push
about 3.4 gigabytes/sec. The Asus motherboard in our test machines
are in-between, as they have a "LinkBoost" feature that overclocks
the PCIe bus, but the two numbers I gave above are more standard.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 04:29:41PM -0400, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
> Thanks, that's pretty much what i was looking for. I'm looking for a test
> machine to learn cuda with and was curious what you had used for
> MB/Processor.
>
> Thanks
> - Michael
>
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:25 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi,
> > Sure, what do you want to know? We ordered the basic boxes from
> > a local vendor and I put the rest of these system together myself.
> > The motherboard is an Asus P5N32-E SLI, with an Intel QX6700 CPU,
> > 8GB of memory, running RHEL4u5 with the 64-bit 2.6.9-55 SMP kernel.
> > One of the test systems has the stock 800 watt PSU that came from
> > our local vendor, I installed a 1200 watt Thermaltake PSU in
> > the other one.
> >
> > Both PSUs work fine, but the 1200 watt PSU is much
> > more convenient because it has six of the PCIe GPU power connectors,
> > and three of them are the new 8-pin variety making it easy to test
> > newer GPU cards. The one with the stock PSU runs fine, but I had
> > to use a bunch of molex-to-PCIe power converter cables. Both test
> > machines originally contained three GeForce 8800GTX GPUs, but most
> > recently I'm now testing one of them with a mix of the the Tesla
> > D870 (two GPUs) deskside unit, and I hope to test some of the newly
> > announced cards sometime in the near future.
> >
> > At present these two test machines are just running CUDA tests and we
> > aren't doing much visualization on them, but we have previously had
> > them setup for running some very demanding VMD visualizations.
> >
> > If you have more questions, let me know.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:04:59PM -0400, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
> > > Does anyone know if the full spec sheet for the Triple GPU test machine,
> > > thats shown on the VMD webpages, exists?
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > > - Michael
> >
> > --
> > NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> > Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> > University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> > Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu Phone: 217-244-3349
> > WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ <http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/%7Ejohns/>
> > Fax: 217-244-6078
> > 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078