I am planning to acquire a Tesla D870 for work with large satellite remote sensing and geographic/geoscience datasets. I currently operate a workstation built around a Tyan Thunder n3600M (S2932-E) motherboard with two Opteron 2218 2.6Ghz dual-core CPUs. I had planned to upgrade to quadcore 23xx Opterons, but the problems AMD has been having with these, means these wont be available for a while and so my upgrade plans have been put back until later this year.
So much for the background…
My questions wrt to the D870:
Are there likely to be any issues associated with using a D870 with either dual- core Opterons or this make and model of motherboard? Ditto, with future quad-core Opterons?
I also plan to install a CUDA enabled graphics card, probably either a Quadro FX3700 or FX4600, will this cause any problems?
I guess you will be using linux64, but if you are going to use windows, be sure to use xp64. There was a report of someone who exceeded 4 Gb in Tesla + Quadro video memory and the solution turned out to be to switch to xp64.
Check with Tyan on the compatibility of your PCI-Express slots. I have an Thunder S2992 with which I was having trouble installing PCI-E graphics cards… talking to Tyan, it turns out that PCI-E graphics are not supported for this mobo.
I know some Tyan server boards dont support PCI-E graphics cards because they have integrated graphics controllers (This is what is implied on the Tyan website anyway).
Everything else seems fine to me. I currently use opteron 8816 processors with my Quadro 5600s + CUDA (using another mobo). I can’t imagine that tesla will throw a wrench anywhere, but I suppose it’s possible.