D870 w. Opteron 22xx & Tyan Thunder MoBo Need thoughts & advice on compatibility

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Folks,

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:

  1. 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?

  2. I also plan to install a CUDA enabled graphics card, probably either a Quadro FX3700 or FX4600, will this cause any problems?

Thank you kindly for your thoughts and advice.

2

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.

3

Thanks,

I should have stated in my opening message, I use Windows XP64 already.

4

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.

5

Good point. Thanks.

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).

Will check.

6

High end nVidia PCI-E graphics cards (Quado FX) are verified by Tyan as being compatible with the Tyan Thunder S2932 boards. See:

http://www.tyan.com/tech/video_s2932.aspx

I presume Tesla systems will be too.

Anyone have view about the Opterons?

Thanks for your continuing interest.

7

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.

8

We have several systems with Opterons in our test lab, and haven’t run into any issues.

9

Hi

We just finished testing this motherboard with D870 and it works. We will update the website to reflect this soon.

Sumit

10

With Redhat Enterprise 4.5 64-bit