The company I am working for is planning to build a supercomputer using at least 2 Teslas (preferably 3). We have most of the components figured out already, but we are still debating what is the best motherboard to use. We have narrowed it down to the ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer or the Tyan S7025.
I believe that the Tyan will support up to 4 Teslas, however I think that this will only work well in Linux, as the board has Aspeed video as opposed to Nvidia. I don’t think the ASUS board has onboard video at all, however I have been reading that it has 2 NF200 chips, which, if I understand correctly, are supposed to increase the maximum available PCI-e lanes on the board from 36 to 64, however I don’t know if these chips have anything to do with video. I am not sure how many PCI-e lanes the Tyan board has, so I would appreciate it if anyone could tell me that.
Further, I know that the ASUS board has 7 PCI-e slots, however from what I have been hearing it is not possible to fit more than 3 double-width cards due to the spacing of the slots. My question is whether or not it is possible to fit 3 double-width cards (i.e. Teslas) and 2 single-width cards (a display card and a NIC) in the PCI-e slots.
I am also curious as to how much of a difference there will be in terms of the speed of the RAM, as it seems the Tyan board only supports up to DDR3 1333 RAM whereas the ASUS board supports up to DDR3 2000 RAM.
Further, I was wondering whether or not it would be possible to put Core i7 processors in the Tyan board rather than Xeon 5500 series processors. The Tyan web page says that the Xeon 5500 series are supported, however it’s an LGA 1366 board with 130W TDP, so it seems like theoretically it should be able to support Core i7 processors, provided the BIOS supports them.
If anyone has any information regarding these questions, your input would be appreciated.
Thanks,
-Crispy