open TELEMAC-MASCARET The mathematically superior suite of solvers

Hi,
At my office we do more and more modelling with Telemac, especially 3D. However, many of the model domains are large and therefore taking too long computation-time with our desktop-computers. Therefore are we in the process of buying a "modelling-computer".

What specs should we focus on in order to optimize the Telemac-computations. Is it a lot of CPU-cores or speed of CPU? Does anyone know if there are planes to make Telemac GPU compatible so that we need to buy a good graphic card? Our budget for the computer is about 5000€ and it must be an HP.

Thankful for all kind of input.

Very interesting question and very hard to answer. I was wondering about a "modeling computer" myself. I did a brief research in the subject and here where I concluded:

• GPU is not in the immediate plans of the developing team and thus no need to invest in an expensive card
• If your domain is small performance diminishes if you create many partitions (i.e. many cores) because of frequent communication between the cpus that could create a bottleneck. Thus it is better to have fewer cores but as fast as possible
• If your domain is large, then there maybe some benefit from many cores with low clock speed vs few cores with high clock speed.
• There is the debate between opting for a fast single socket Xeon E3 or E5, and the dual socket equivalent of the same cost. With a dual socket setup you will have twice the memory bandwidth (or nearly twice the bandwidth because Intel gives more memory bandwidth to its higher end CPUs). With this setup, you may overcome a possible memory bottleneck from multiple partitions and benefit from the extra cores

I have yet to setup a workstation, so these are speculations for the time being. I hope that someone with actual experience can shed some light.

Regards,
Costas

To optimize Telemac computations, you should focus on a combination of CPU speed and the number of CPU cores. Telemac is a CPU-intensive software, so you will benefit from having a fast CPU with multiple cores. In addition, having a large amount of RAM is also important as Telemac requires a lot of memory for larger models.

Unfortunately, Telemac does not currently support GPU acceleration, so you won't benefit from buying a powerful graphics card. However, it's always a good idea to check the latest version of Telemac to see if this feature has been added.

Based on your budget and HP requirement, you could consider buying a workstation-grade PC with an Intel Xeon or AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU with at least 12 cores and a high clock speed, along with 32-64 GB of RAM. You could also invest in a fast SSD or NVMe drive to improve the read/write speeds during model input/output operations.

It's worth noting that hardware specs are just one factor when it comes to optimizing Telemac computations. You should also make sure that you are using the latest version of the software and following best practices for model setup and optimization.