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Building a powerful computer for HFSS

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z3phyr

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I'm starting my job and I need a powerful computer for HFSS simulations. I'm not very familiar with the latest PC technologies so I wonder if anybody could give some suggestions on possible configurations of a powerful PC computer for running HFSS simulations.

I have a budget of $3000.

Thanks in advance!

z3
 

For HFSS, you need a desktop computer with at least these key points:

- One/two processors with as many cores as you can afford (like Intel i7 ones)

- 8-16 GB of RAM Memory

- Dedicated Graphics card (ATI Radeon, Nvidia) with 1-2 GB of RAM

With the indicated budget, you may easily meet these specifications. Good luck!
 

I agree with the previous answer but add the requirement of a medium to good motherboard that supports several physical memory channels to DIMMs.

Additional note is to buy smaller chips so that all your memory DIMMs are filled as this will allow i7 to use several memory channels.

For example: If you buy only 1x 4GB DDR3 memory chip then i7 will only use one memory channel. If you buy 2x2GB DDR3 the i7 will use 2 seperate memory channels to access memory. This can lead to approximately 30 to 40% speedup for algorithms requiring large memory access.
I have included Intel whitepaper to support above.

Let us know which way you go.
 

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magicfoot said:
I agree with the previous answer but add the requirement of a medium to good motherboard that supports several physical memory channels to DIMMs.

<snip>
I have included Intel whitepaper to support above.
Click to expand...

That paper is not by Intel but by Infinion and Kingson. It is also more than 8 years old. It talks of dual channels, but to the best of my knowledge, 3 channels is the norm for high end processors.

I would have thought Intel Xeons were the only sensible option for very computer intensive applications. The Intel Xeon E7-8870 costs more than his budget for the entire computer. I don't think an i7 has anywhere near the performance of the Xeons.

Note some of the Xeons are not capable of addressing a lot of memory (only 24-32 GB), whereas others, which use fully buffered RAM, are capable of addressing huge amounts of RAM.

I'm not an expert on this, and would appreciate some guidance myself on this very matter, but I think providing references to 8-year old papers is not likely to give much insight into how to chose a modern computer.

With the cost of HHSS, it does seem to be unwise to limits ones budget for the computer to only $3000.
 
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i would look at a fairly standard config, such as an I7 cpu, but look into a GPU processor card. You might be able to get one for $3000, and add memory later on when you get more money.

---------- Post added at 22:25 ---------- Previous post was at 22:21 ----------

Yes, $2000 for a tesla card:

NVIDIA Tesla C2050 Computing Processor - 3GB GDDR5 RAM, PCI-Express 2.0, 448 Processing Cores, NVIDIA CUDA, DVI at TigerDirect.com

Look into what that card can plug into, and go that way.

Just make sure you spend a lot on the computer's power supply!

Also check with HFSS to see what tesla cards they do support. I see the 2070, but not the 2050
 

Note also, unless your HFSS license supports more than one CPU, you wont be able to use more than one. Under Tools -> Options -> HFFS Options, you can select the number of processors for for the solver (Solver tab) and Post Processing (General tab). If you select the number to be more than 1, and you only have a license for 1, you will get a warning message and HFSS will only use one core. If your license is for only one core, you might as well limit yourself to a dual core machine and get the fastest cores you can get. (By having two cores, HFSS will be able to make better use of one of them).

Another thing to be aware of is that machines which can use lots of memory will needed fully buffered RAM. That costs a lot more per GB than unbuffered RAM.
 

Thank you all for your advice. I'm with a university so we get discounted license for HFSS.

I'll try to come up with a configuration in a few weeks and keep you guys updated.

Thanks and happy new year!

---------- Post added at 20:10 ---------- Previous post was at 19:48 ----------

Hi biff44

This looks interesting.

I can't seem to find if HFSS supports the Tesla card. Do you have a link for that?

I also wonder how the Tesla card play against a more traditional architecture, say a dual-Xeon.

Best
Leo
biff44 said:
i would look at a fairly standard config, such as an I7 cpu, but look into a GPU processor card. You might be able to get one for $3000, and add memory later on when you get more money.

---------- Post added at 22:25 ---------- Previous post was at 22:21 ----------

Yes, $2000 for a tesla card:

NVIDIA Tesla C2050 Computing Processor - 3GB GDDR5 RAM, PCI-Express 2.0, 448 Processing Cores, NVIDIA CUDA, DVI at TigerDirect.com

Look into what that card can plug into, and go that way.

Just make sure you spend a lot on the computer's power supply!

Also check with HFSS to see what tesla cards they do support. I see the 2070, but not the 2050
Click to expand...
 

Here is what I have found (for what its worth):

I am not sure Xeons are the best.. The Xeons and Motherboards are quite expensive, and you get quite a bang for your buck with i7s..
HFSS is also not completely multi-threaded so you will always spend a lot of time "setting up simulaton" and "building matrixes" so it pays to have a machine which can do this fast (like a gaming machine)

As mentioned before, Memory bandwidth, Memory speed and amount of memory is critical as is a motherboard with fast memory transfer rates.

If you use an i7-920 etc.. you can use triple-channel memory DDR3 RAM. To make best use of this, install 3 DRAMs, so 3 x 4MByte = 12Gig RAM (in the right slots of course)

If you use an i7-2700K or similar, it uses dual-channel DDR3 RAM , so you can insert 2 x 2 Dimms. These support 32GByte RAM (4 x 8Gig) and if you get fast 1600 ram,
you can overclock to 4.2GHz safely. This gives you quite a fast machine quite cheaply. You can buy all this on ebay as a bare bones bundle for not much!
There are even reports of 64GByte machines now that 16Gig RAM is available but I am not sure if this is officially supported.

Incidentally.. look around for the latest 30nm DDR3 ram from a well known Korean company.. quite cheap, very fast and no silly cooling fins, and overclock like crazy.

If course, the i7-3930K or 3960K are slighly better, but not a huge amount.

Incidentlally, the i7-2700K also has a built-in graphics which seems to be fine for HFSS. You do not need a super fancy graphics card.

Oh... one more thing.. HFSS seems to fare much better with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS. Hope this helps!
 
Thanks for the tips!

I ended up buying an expensive i7-4960X with 64GB memory. It runs pretty fast with the HPC-Pool license, but I haven't done any serious bench-marking yet. I also haven't tried turning the hyperthreading off. With the hyperthreading on though, you seem to be able to run parallel parametric sweeps. I'm using the latest Ansys EM Suite 15.0



hughrpg said:
Here is what I have found (for what its worth):

I am not sure Xeons are the best.. The Xeons and Motherboards are quite expensive, and you get quite a bang for your buck with i7s..
HFSS is also not completely multi-threaded so you will always spend a lot of time "setting up simulaton" and "building matrixes" so it pays to have a machine which can do this fast (like a gaming machine)

As mentioned before, Memory bandwidth, Memory speed and amount of memory is critical as is a motherboard with fast memory transfer rates.

If you use an i7-920 etc.. you can use triple-channel memory DDR3 RAM. To make best use of this, install 3 DRAMs, so 3 x 4MByte = 12Gig RAM (in the right slots of course)

If you use an i7-2700K or similar, it uses dual-channel DDR3 RAM , so you can insert 2 x 2 Dimms. These support 32GByte RAM (4 x 8Gig) and if you get fast 1600 ram,
you can overclock to 4.2GHz safely. This gives you quite a fast machine quite cheaply. You can buy all this on ebay as a bare bones bundle for not much!
There are even reports of 64GByte machines now that 16Gig RAM is available but I am not sure if this is officially supported.

Incidentally.. look around for the latest 30nm DDR3 ram from a well known Korean company.. quite cheap, very fast and no silly cooling fins, and overclock like crazy.

If course, the i7-3930K or 3960K are slighly better, but not a huge amount.

Incidentlally, the i7-2700K also has a built-in graphics which seems to be fine for HFSS. You do not need a super fancy graphics card.

Oh... one more thing.. HFSS seems to fare much better with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS. Hope this helps!
Click to expand...
 

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