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<p>Jim,</p>
<p>I'm reluctant to expose my ignorance, but I think I have some
experience to share. And I don't believe this is a cluster issue.<br>
</p>
<p>My company -- and I do mean my company -- did 2-d multiphysics
MHD simulations up until about 4 years ago using our proprietary
multiblock domain decomposition code. The diffusive magnetic
field solver used all the vector operators in EM. So we share that
much of the problems you are wanting to run.<br>
</p>
<p>At the end, we did our computations on 4 workstations connected
by ancient single-channel Infiniband -- approximately 10 GB/sec
but with ~1 micro second latency which was critical for the small
messages we were sending.</p>
<p>About 10 years ago Mellanox was dumping those and we bought 24
cards and two switches, one 8 port and one 16 port. They cost us
a little more than GB ethernet cards, but they were 30-40 times
shorter latency.<br>
</p>
<p>So we built two clusters in 2012. Both used handbuilt deskside
workstation boxes which we set up on commercial retail store
chrome racks -- NOT 1U or 2U.</p>
<p>As time went by, we upgraded to dual core, then quad core, then 8
core CPUs with motherboards and memory to match. We used CentOS 5
for the Infiniband until it wasn't suitable for the motherboards
required and then we went to CentOS 7. We never paid for RHEL.</p>
<p>At the last version, we found that we often were able to run
problems on single 8-core machines.</p>
<p>We stuck with AMD chips because they were faster for the money
than Intel's. The last CPUs we bought were capable of
hyperthreading so we could run 16 jobs on each 8-core box.</p>
<p>I bet one deskside workstation running an <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=amd+12+core">AMD
Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core CPU</a> would be able to do the job you
want, quietly, at low power, and hence low cooling requirement.
Your problems seem to be embarrasingly parallel, but if you need
communication between processes you could use in-memory
communication, which is LOTS faster than any Infiniband. And
CentOS is fully equipped to get you an MPI with that.</p>
<p>Python is available. Don't know about your NEC or plotting
software. Source for NEC could be built on your new workstation
if necessary.<br>
</p>
<p>You need a friendly sysadmin and programmer to set it up, get it
going, and get you around the list of approved workstations.</p>
<p>Hope this isn't too far from your requirements. Good luck!</p>
<p>Mike<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
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