[Paraview] Message to anyone who has recently built/purchased a workstation for paraview use.

[Robert Akers]

Hi,

we intend to purchase a workstation before end of financial year for the primary use of paraview 3D data rendering (fusion energy research).  If anyone has done similar in the last few months, I'd be very interested to know what you recommend for between £4K (GBP) and £6K.

We have been quoted £6.5K for a top end CAD workstation with dual 6-core CPUs, 24GB of RAM and a top end 6GB CAD level NVIDIA GPU.  My main worry is that for a single machine paraview setup with a single GPU whether the code can exploit the potential 24 hyperthreads of the CPUs - would it be better just to go for a single dual or quad core CPU and spend the money instead on a decent fast, large volume RAID setup and the fastest GPU we can get our hands on?

Or, is it possible to set up paraview to use MPI (assuming it doesn't deploy openMP) on a single machine with multiple cores but with multiple "cheaper" GPUs and in the end get better performance?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated,

Rob.