Electromagnetic field simulation machine (September 2024 edition)

A customer involved in the development of semiconductor products contacted us inquiring about a workstation for electromagnetic field simulation.

The specific purpose is to use COMSOL, and the hardware requirements are 200GB or more of memory and 1TB or more of storage. If there is room to increase the memory to more than 200GB in the future, we have been told that 128GB is fine as the initial shipping state. As for the CPU, when using COMSOL with the Wave Optics Module, the customer requested a CPU that can quickly process large-scale three-dimensional calculations that require 200GB of memory.

Based on these conditions, we proposed the following configuration.

Expandable memory configurations

The memory is 32GB in total, with four 4GB modules. There are four free slots, so you can add more memory in the future. The simplest way to achieve a memory capacity of 128GB or more is to add four 4GB modules, the same as the existing modules.
On the other hand, the CPU (Xeon W7-2575X) used in this configuration has a maximum memory channel of "4", so if you prioritize processing speed, a configuration with four memory modules for a total of 4GB is ideal. In that case, it is most effective to remove the existing four 256GB modules and replace them with four 32GB modules. COMSOL is software that prioritizes memory bandwidth speed, so please consider this if you prioritize processing speed.

Does a slower clock speed mean slower calculations?

The CPU used is an Intel Xeon W7-2575X (22 cores). As you may be aware, even if the CPU has many cores, if the clock speed (processing speed per core) is low, the calculation time may be extended. However, the latest CPUs do not have extremely low clock speeds. COMSOL Multiphysics and Lumerical FDTD are software that make the most of the number of cores when processing multiple models in parallel, so a CPU with a large number of cores is very effective. The number of memory channels is also important, and a CPU with 1 or more channels is recommended for COMSOL.

The NVIDIA A1000 was selected as the video card most suitable for rendering both software programs.