replacing hardware?

replacing hardware?

[Steve Kargl]

All,

The systems that I've used while hacking on gfortran
bugs and features are starting to show their age.  I'm
in the early stage of put together the wishlist for
a budget friendly replacement.  While I'll likely go
with a Ryzen7 cpu, NVME M2 drives, and as much memory 
as I can afford, I'm looking for recommendations for
a budget friendly video/gpu card that will allow me to
take a deeper dive into openacc/openmp and offloading. 
Anyone have a suggestion?

Note, I've mostly used FreeBSD over the last 25+ years.
I suspect that pursuing offloading may  be easier with
a flavor linux.  Any recommendation would also be
appreciated.

-- 
Steve

Re: replacing hardware?

[Richard Biener]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 6:43 PM Steve Kargl via Fortran
<fortran@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> All,
>
> The systems that I've used while hacking on gfortran
> bugs and features are starting to show their age.  I'm
> in the early stage of put together the wishlist for
> a budget friendly replacement.  While I'll likely go
> with a Ryzen7 cpu, NVME M2 drives, and as much memory
> as I can afford, I'm looking for recommendations for
> a budget friendly video/gpu card that will allow me to
> take a deeper dive into openacc/openmp and offloading.
> Anyone have a suggestion?

I am sofar doing "functional level" testing of offloading with
a GTX 1650 which is I think the most affordable thing you
can still get.  Not sure how future proof this will be though
with future support from NVIDIA (you still need CUDA for
offloading).  I have not yet had success with any consumer
AMD graphics product, the gcn backend requires
the radeon instinct compute cards.

So I suppose any "cheap" nvidia will do, of course
performance wise it will suck (esp. when doing FP64 - also
watch out if they eventually disable that completely on
some consumer card generations)

Richard.

> Note, I've mostly used FreeBSD over the last 25+ years.
> I suspect that pursuing offloading may  be easier with
> a flavor linux.  Any recommendation would also be
> appreciated.
>
> --
> Steve

Re: replacing hardware?

[o1bigtenor]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 1:40 AM Richard Biener via Fortran
<fortran@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 6:43 PM Steve Kargl via Fortran
> <fortran@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > All,
> >
> > The systems that I've used while hacking on gfortran
> > bugs and features are starting to show their age.  I'm
> > in the early stage of put together the wishlist for
> > a budget friendly replacement.  While I'll likely go
> > with a Ryzen7 cpu, NVME M2 drives, and as much memory
> > as I can afford, I'm looking for recommendations for
> > a budget friendly video/gpu card that will allow me to
> > take a deeper dive into openacc/openmp and offloading.
> > Anyone have a suggestion?
>
> I am sofar doing "functional level" testing of offloading with
> a GTX 1650 which is I think the most affordable thing you
> can still get.  Not sure how future proof this will be though
> with future support from NVIDIA (you still need CUDA for
> offloading).  I have not yet had success with any consumer
> AMD graphics product, the gcn backend requires
> the radeon instinct compute cards.
>
> So I suppose any "cheap" nvidia will do, of course
> performance wise it will suck (esp. when doing FP64 - also
> watch out if they eventually disable that completely on
> some consumer card generations)
>
>
That's problematic as Nvidia's support for open source is
at best spotty and if you're doing something a tiny bit out
of 'usual' - - - - terrible.

My previous system I started using 3 - 570 nvidia gpus and
when 2 failed some 8 years i I replaced them using only 1 -  1650 Ti.
My issue was that I wanted to using a HDMI monitor as part of
my group - - - - - the results were a system that would need a restart
every 2 weeks and it was a royal PITA with the nuisance.
My present system is quite more reliable but today's browsers
are now also increasing the issues - - - - argh!!!!!

HTH

Re: replacing hardware?

[Jerry D]

On 4/13/23 9:43 AM, Steve Kargl via Fortran wrote:
> All,
> 
> The systems that I've used while hacking on gfortran
> bugs and features are starting to show their age.  I'm
> in the early stage of put together the wishlist for
> a budget friendly replacement.  While I'll likely go
> with a Ryzen7 cpu, NVME M2 drives, and as much memory
> as I can afford, I'm looking for recommendations for
> a budget friendly video/gpu card that will allow me to
> take a deeper dive into openacc/openmp and offloading.
> Anyone have a suggestion?
> 
> Note, I've mostly used FreeBSD over the last 25+ years.
> I suspect that pursuing offloading may  be easier with
> a flavor linux.  Any recommendation would also be
> appreciated.
> 

Hi Steve,

If you are into building your own, I am using:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-ELITE-rev-10#kf

It has plenty of sata ports and I am using a 1TB pci4 m2 drive. It 
supports two m2's so no problems on storage. Do get a pci4 drive, rather 
fast.

This motherboard will support the Ryzen 5000 series chips which are 
rather impressive.  I have a Ryzen 3600 which for me is adequate, 
however I have an upgrade path.

I use Fedora which has all the standard tools well supported. Ubuntu is 
as useful, with some differences in the package manager and looks of the 
Gnome Desktop. (All very configurable.

I just bought a cheap video card as I am not exploring the offloading.

Cheers,

Jerry

Re: replacing hardware?

[Roland Hughes]

If you wan raw horsepower on a "working man's" wage, get one of these.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383809689955?hash=item595cd71963:g:6NAAAOSwg4JhCKuJ&amdata=enc%3AAQAIAAAAwOngs27VAqvfureMtmK3O3TxUN8Opb7KbjeXhpl96DaDi%2BpSMCspc40m34f7wzlxF%2BX45dfQ8gIXlzjf6fMo7fQ%2Bd%2FLFVgwFRORxnAcRFKjjheHahPafOROUjs7yGNHpAM2hsg5JH6vcvU9mA9yyIoBFMIlEZELhAZ34xCCpMCvsEgzA73XBFddWtfV7FqHGXWrOsvP0B5WmRmCrODzhkH0msX1XB%2FXxf3fDYIxPcDITg7colOPlaNo93ATw2VhZYA%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR9TglPvvYQ

They are mighty slow from a cold boot verifying all of their firmware, 
but they scream. Put at least a 6TB WD Black for your "work" drive, use 
SSD only for boot.

I have one of these I use for Yocto builds. I can give a Ubuntu VM 
16-core and 90GB of RAM. With the virtual drive on the WD Black, a 
complete Linux from scratch build for an embedded system is under 3.5 hours.

If you only need a few core CUDA core, a pair of these will cost you 
well under $50

https://www.ebay.com/itm/364218004301?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20220920135554%26meid%3D490d57d5aabe4457afe337f1c6aa1605%26pid%3D101197%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D295380047025%26itm%3D364218004301%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DSimplAMLv9PairwiseWebMskuAspectsV202110NoVariantSeedKnnRecallV1%26brand%3DNVIDIA&_trksid=p2047675.c101197.m1850&amdata=cksum%3A364218004301490d57d5aabe4457afe337f1c6aa1605%7Cenc%3AAQAIAAABIJiyRA3UZOlY17tF8AfiSuRQhHC9c8zdhSad9rXZnwgXvfF0F0w2wQB9U6A4KFPHsgpqramMJ0IucFGCD0JT%252BF35flAQd1p2pgAxUhPkACs7fyGCi2Kmkbkap7sEf29z4T1tcYqHIgSzdNOG1MOYulEWTDyKPdEGX1ZD3Y5YmtSvdJWTbnODktzI%252FOxgP1OvnvyjHiiOxLs6eKwjAxkQlGxpfmagbcVGZqZakRV0q7if3tQ8o2Skrg7JazTvTE3pSz2LVaj28KYa5f2U46xzSarOdrR6T8k2GFHYUX8gtiy6cvg2qUOCFtImZL%252FTu24tLizEjk2gDzTx%252BTZIhA9hD%252BDk0OhzGYqFhPpHyO7ZiHjjCzmifYiIFcAFCdQoLVrL%252Fw%253D%253D%7Campid%3APL_CLK%7Cclp%3A2047675

I stuck a P600 in mine to get 384 CUDA core for well under $100

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255787052523

If that class of machine is too far past "hobby" for you, (can there 
really be such a thing???) then I recommend one of these.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125606569756

Again, get yourself a WD Black spinning disk of at least 4TB to be your 
"work" disk. Use your M2 only for the boot OS. I loaded Manjaro on mine 
with an M2 black 1TB drive and a WD Black 6TB spinning disk. I also 
installed an NVS 310 and the slim DVD RW. For around $600 you can have a 
machine that boots instantly and runs great.

On the Z820 I run Windows 10 and lots of different Linux distros in VMs.

On the z2 G4, I run Manjaro Cinnamon Linux. That's an Arch based Linux, 
but an almost user friendly one.

For those just getting their feet wet with a desktop Linux I recommend 
the current Ubuntu LTS release, not because it is good, but because when 
you search on the Internet the first help pages for how to do something 
will invariably use Ubuntu. Arch doesn't use Debian packaging.

Beginners should avoid RPM based distros at all costs. Waaay too many 
"We do it this way and don't care what the known universe has chosen to 
do" situations for a beginner.

Just my 0.002 cents.

On 4/14/2023 3:18 AM, fortran-request@gcc.gnu.org wrote:
> replacing hardware? (Steve Kargl)

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593  (cell)
http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net
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