Performance wise, yes the GeForce gaming cards somewhat perversely tend to
be faster than their 'professional' Tesla cousins.
Essentially they are the same underlying chip as the Tesla series GPUs but
are not as extensively tested and 'sometimes' have less memory. The clock
speeds and memory bandwidth tend to be higher though (as well as the power
usage sometimes) since there is more pressure to sit on the bleeding edge
in the consumer gaming arena.
There are claims the GeForce cards are not as reliable as Tesla and don't
have ECC but ECC makes no measurable difference and some vendors will
offer full warranties on GeForce HPC systems. The following page shows
recommended hardware through Exxact
http://ambermd.org/gpus/recommended_hardware.htm#hardware who can offer
AMBER certified systems with either Tesla or GeForce and they will
warranty both the same.
In terms of latest hardware your best options are:
GTX-Titan Black - (This will be announced by NVIDIA in a few days so stay
tuned - it will kick butt performance wise!!! - This replaces the
GTX-Titan which is end of line.)
GTX-780 - This is the low cost version of the GTX-Titan
K20 / K20X / K40 - these are the profession Tesla variants - they tend to
cost about 4 to 8 times more than the GeForce cards.
Here's some numbers for AMBER JAC NVE on the three different cards listed
in increasing cost:
1 x GTX780: | ns/day = 98.96 ns/day
1 x GTX-Titan: 107.95 ns/day
1 x K20: 80.81 ns/day
1 x K20X: 89.13 ns/day
1 x K40: 102.00 ns/day
Note the cool thing about AMBER on GPUs is that it does not use the CPU -
so you can put 4 of these GPUs in a single box and run 4 calculations at
once and they will all run at the speeds shown above giving you aggregate
performance of 4 times that for a single GPU. You can also buy dirt cheap
low bin CPUs and save lots of money.
As I say if you aren't comfortable with speccing hardware / building your
own etc I encourage you to contact Exxact. I have worked very closely with
them to put together machine specs and designs that maximize the AMBER
performance for a given budget. So if you contact them with your budget
they can spec up a machine that gives you optimum performance for AMBER
within that budget.
All the best
Ross
On 2/12/14, 3:39 PM, "Chinthaka Ratnaweera" <cnr88.msstate.edu> wrote:
>I am little confused about naming of these cards. As I understand
>Tesla/Fermi/Kepler are different architectures. So what is then meant by
>Tesla KXX? ( Is it Kepler of Tesla?) What is the architecture of GTX
>cards?
>
>My second question is according to Amber benchmarks GTX Titan has the
>overall best performance. ( K40 is marginally better for implicit
>solvents). Amber support page recommended either GTX titan / 780 or K20
>for
>workstations. Does this mean both have same kind of performance?
>
>
>On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 4:47 PM, Scott Le Grand
><varelse2005.gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Anything Tesla/Fermi/Kepler is supported on AMBER 12. Yes anything...
>>
>> AMBER 14 regrettably had to drop Tesla support (C1060, GTX 2xx) because
>> continued maintenance of the code became impractical.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:42 PM, Shaw, Sharon <sharon.shaw.hp.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>> > Yes, it is listed on the Amber webpage:
>> >
>> > http://ambermd.org/gpus/#supported_gpus
>> >
>> > Sharon
>> >
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Chinthaka Ratnaweera [mailto:cnr88.msstate.edu]
>> > Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 3:59 PM
>> > To: AMBER Mailing List
>> > Subject: [AMBER] Tesla K40
>> >
>> > Does Amber 12 supports Tesla K40? I saw that is currently the highest
>> > performing Nvidia GPU.
>> >
>> > http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-servers.html
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > AMBER mailing list
>> > AMBER.ambermd.org
>> > http://lists.ambermd.org/mailman/listinfo/amber
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > AMBER mailing list
>> > AMBER.ambermd.org
>> > http://lists.ambermd.org/mailman/listinfo/amber
>> >
>> _______________________________________________
>> AMBER mailing list
>> AMBER.ambermd.org
>> http://lists.ambermd.org/mailman/listinfo/amber
>>
>
>
>
>--
>Chinthaka Nadun Ratnaweera
>Hand Lab Rm 1126
>Mississippi State University
>310 Presidents Circle
>Starkville, MS 39762
>_______________________________________________
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Received on Thu Feb 13 2014 - 10:00:03 PST
