Does anyone have any experience with setting up a very simple HPC Environment at all?
I run a very CPU intensive CFD software and the licensing is per CPU. We have been offered a trial license to test HPC from them.
However the costs to setup the data fabric connectivity is quite large, and as at the moment I would like to test this out on 3 Dell t5500 workstations, I was thinking if I could get away with adding 10Gbe cards and directly linking them with no data switch? Feasable for HPC I do not know.
Obviously I would have to for now run Windows server 2012 trial on three machines (removing licensed windows 7) and add the HPC pack. The primary node would have majority of RAM and disk as well as being the main data connector to the other two.
Anyone with any thoughts on the feasibility on this, as the initial capital outlay would only be the 10Gb Network cards this way. And if it works then on top would be the server license cost.
And for information the software requires a local install on a windows machine and data is taken from cad, tweaked and the analysis can then be performed on that model.
Calculation time currently is limited to 6 cores and can take a number of days. So the aim is to move to HPC so we can take advantage of all cores in all the calculation team whereby the main data connector would require the ram to hold the data results.
Any help ot thoughts would be great.