Hi Wu.

1) Do you think above mentioned CPUs  and GPUs would be able to run CUDA and BEDPOSTX ? Is it appropriate or should we look for some other configuration?  

Yes, it will work, but I do not recommend Quadro GPUs They are expensive and the performance is not so great as Tesla, specially in double precission. 

I prefer Tesla family, and if not possible, GeForce (not as good performance as Tesla but more affordable than Quadro).

 2) Do you think it is better to have 2 CPUs for and 2 GPUs for quickers image pre-processing? or there is as such no difference in the results when compared to ony one CPU and one GPU.

Each GPU needs one CPU core, and each of these processors has 10 cores?. So, one processor is enough, although you still can use the rest of CPU cores for running other tasks in parallel.

I am not sure about memory buses (for copying data CPU <-> GPU). Take a look to the configuration, PCIexpress, NVLINK...

In any case, bedpostx does not need to copy much data... so this is not a problem if these transfers happens sequentially.

3 & 4) Yes, UbuntuOS is ok for bedpostx_gpu, however, if you want to make things easier when installing FSL, use CentOS (used forFSL distribution)

Moises.

On 15 February 2018 at 10:22, Wu chen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear FSL Users and Experts,

We are thinking to order following configuration for CUDA implementation and I have some questions related to it.

First Processor

-Xeon E5-2630V4 2.2Ghz 20MB Turbo Boost (S26361-F5001-E220)

Second Processor

                -2^ND XEON E5-2630V4 (S26361-F5002-E230)

RAM

-16 x 16 GB = 256GB RAM

HDD SATA III

                 -2TB x 2 = 4TB

First Graphics Card

                  -NVIDIA QUADRO M5000 8GB ( S26361-F2222-E593 )

Second Graphics Card

                 -NVIDIA QUADRO M5000 8GB (S26361-F2222-E990)




1) Do you think above mentioned CPUs  and GPUs would be able to run CUDA and BEDPOSTX ? Is it appropriate or should we look for some other configuration? Please suggest a configuration if you disagree with our configuration.

2) Do you think it is better to have 2 CPUs for and 2 GPUs for quickers image pre-processing? or there is as such no difference in the results when compared to ony one CPU and one GPU

3) Which CentoOS version and CUDA version would you suggest to install on the above configuration?

4) Can we run CUDA implementation on UbuntuOS?

I really appreciate your time and efforts for making our lab more faster and more powerful.

Many Thanks

Best, Wu