Let's have the community help us decide on GPUs!
12 Dec 2022 2:43:54 UTC
Topic 228707
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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?
Well the new AMD RDNA3 gpus
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Well the new AMD RDNA3 gpus release Tuesday so you will see where they compare to the Nvidia 4000 series with respect to performance and price point.
Rumors are the top of line 7900XTX is equivalent to the Nvidia 4080, probably better in every way with respect to compute performance.
As long as you can get around the headache of the AMD drivers.
If you can get your hands on
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If you can get your hands on a 4090 or two, those will be the most performant. Better than anything else available, except maybe an H100.
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7900XTX versus 4090? I
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7900XTX versus 4090?
I know the 7900XTX is about half the price of the 4090. What about dual 7900XTX versus a 4090?
it's unknown at this point
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it's unknown at this point how well the 7900XTX (or XT) will perform since it's not out yet. release date is tomorrow Dec 13th. All of the early reviews today and tomorrow are likely to be gaming focused and not necessarily an indication of computer performance so take those with a grain of salt until you can get some real compute benchmark results to compare to Nvidia 40-series.
also unknown what 3rd party pricing will be on the 7900XTX. the 4090 MSRP is $1599, vs $999 for the 7900XTX, not quite double apples to apples. but 2x 7900XTX will use more power than the single 4090, if that matters to you.
the OS choice could make a bit of difference too. the performance gap could grow even wider if you decided to use Linux, as Petri's custom FGRPB1G and BRP7 apps are available for Linux, but not Windows.
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Ian&Steve C. wrote: it's
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We will most likely be using Linux on these systems. The 3rd party pricing is definitely going to be interesting- I really like the 3rd party solutions that integrate water cooling since it will take up less space on the motherboard. However, availability would probably be one of the deciding factors for which 3rd party GPU would be purchased.
What about Radeon VII? They
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What about Radeon VII? They used to be the top performers here.
Bang for buck rtx 3080 ti seems to be it.
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Boca Raton Community HS
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As Tom said, the RTX 3080Ti is the best bang-for-buck GPU, and with Petri's apps it even beats the 4090, though not by much. I'm getting about 79-80 seconds per task with running x2 tasks per GPU in Linux Ubuntu.
Food for thought...
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
GWGeorge007 wrote: Boca
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Would Petri's app work for the 4090 as well? Does it only work for certain Nvidia gpus?
Boca Raton Community HS
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which app?
the FGRPB1G app is OpenCL and should work for a 4090, but I've not seen anyone with a 4090 run it yet.
his BRP7 app is CUDA, and I did compile a CUDA 11.8 app that should work for it.
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the FGRPB1G app is
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the FGRPB1G app is OpenCL and should work for a 4090, but I've not seen anyone with a 4090 run it yet.
Being OpenCL, would it work on an AMD card, or is it still NV only? I was under the impression each sauce was Linux only and Nvidia only.
Thanks