Most FLOPS for ~$2000

[klapaucius]

Buying around the end of this year, no graphics needed, number of cores/machines flexible. Would I be best off with two OC'd i7-3930K machines, or would some kind of server build be better?

 

[cuecuemore]

I'm betting OC'ed 3820s will get you more bang for your buck, but the 3930k will, no doubt be impressive. Does value figure heavily here or simply sheer performance?

 

[klapaucius]

Thanks, mostly performance. So would that be 3-4 separate machines with the 3820s, or could it be a dual/quad socket?

Sorry for the basic questions.

 

[cuecuemore]

I'd imagine that there will be dual socket LGA 2011 motherboards, but I don't know if they'll accept the i7 CPUs. The X79/LGA 2011 platform is replacing the X58/LGA1366 platform as the enthusiast/quasi-server offering from Intel. There were dual socket LGA 1366 boards, but they only accepted the Xeon CPUs, for whatever architectural reason, something about 2x QPI instead of one. It sounds like your workload is easily distributable since you don't seem to care how many cores or even if they're in the same box, and unfortunately, I don't know too much about this, so hopefully someone else can shed some light

EDIT: You might look into these for parallel computing:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sandy-bridge-e-xeon-cpu-servers,13308.html

 

[klapaucius]

Yes, this is just numerical stuff in C/C++ that can be split into chunks.

Looking at it more I think I have to figure out first if I should be programming the GPU directly with CUDA or something. Thanks for your help.