Recommended hardware requirements

Coreform Cubit
#1

We often get questions from users about what hardware specs we recommend for Coreform Cubit. Hardware and software is always a moving target, so this advice might be stale in a few years - though it might not.

First of all, from the Coreform FAQ:

What are the minimum hardware requirements?

Answer: Coreform recommends the following minimum hardware requirements:

  • 4GB RAM (8GB or more recommended)
  • 1GB disk space
  • Graphics card and driver capable of supporting OpenGL 3.2 (A software-based implementation of OpenGL 3.2 is provided as an alternative, but may slow the process.)
  • 1280 x 1024 screen resolution

NOTE: More memory and faster processors are recommended for meshes with very large mesh element counts.

That’s a good place to start. But let me give you a bit more advice and a few example setups.

General advice

Parallelism

Very few of Coreform Cubit’s routines support multi-core / parallel processing. The TetMesh meshing scheme supports thread-based parallelism on up to 8 cores, but in my experience the speedups tend to be marginal (maybe ~20% faster on 8 threads). Coreform Cubit’s Sculpt meshing tool does support process-based parallelism and we don’t limit how many processes you can use (so feel free to run on your large computing cluster). The other exception is that we do use graphics cards (inherently thread-based parallelism with thousands of graphics processors) for rendering.

(Definitions)

Thread-based parallelism: multiple cores all referencing the same data.

  • Analogy: Using Overleaf or Google Docs with multiple collaborators all making edits at the same time

Process-based parallelism: multiple cores but new computer processes are spun up and the data is split up and passed to each.

  • Analogy: Emailing a Word document to your collaborators and saying “@kim please do Section 1 and 3, I’ll do 2 & 4, and @zac you add the project details and bibliography…”)

Memory

Computing is all about data: reading data, writing data, moving data. Some data is non-volatile (e.g., saving a file) while some is volatile (RAM clears out when you turn off your computer). We tend to call the non-volatile “storage” and the volatile “memory”. Generally the speed of reading/writing data from these goes (fast to slow):

  • L1 Cache
    • Part of your physical CPU, very close to the processors (small, but fast)
  • L2 Cache
    • Part of your physical CPU, pretty close to the processors (a bit bigger, a bit slower)
  • L3 Cache
    • Part of your physical CPU, close to the processors (a bit bigger still, a bit slower still)
  • RAM
    • A separate module of memory, sold in modules and connected to the motherboard. Fairly far away from the CPU so considerably slower than the L1-L3 cache, but many orders of magnitude larger.
  • Disk
    • Either a spinning hard disk (very very very very slow compared to RAM) or a SSD (very slow compared to RAM) but can you can get a lot, for relatively cheap. If you run out of RAM your computer might start “swapping” RAM to the disk… this kills performance.

Consider that if you care about performance with Cubit, it’s probably because you have big meshes / geometries that are inherently “big data” and “big compute”. So, what this means is that the best way to get performance out of Coreform Cubit that here’s how I would prioritize spending your money:

  1. A very-high performance CPU (fast clock speed, high-quality silicon (e.g., Intel i9) supporting overclocking / turbo-boost, with as much cache as possible).
  2. Fast RAM, fastest you can get that’s compatible with your CPU, and a decent amount of it. I personally recommend at least 64GB, ideally 128GB or more.
  3. A decent graphics card. You don’t need a top of the line card, but get a decent amount of “VRAM” on the card (8GB is probably more than fine, 4GB maybe minimum).
  4. Fill out your budget with as much SSD as you can get (SSD is 10-100x or more faster than HDD). Don’t worry too much anymore about “lifetime” of an SSD, I haven’t had an SSD fail on me in over 10 years of pretty heavy use.

And for additional guidance, here’s a few specs of computers that I use:

My Coreform Workstation

  • Graphics card:
    • NVIDIA RTX A2000 (12GB)
  • Processor:
    • Intel Xeon w5-3435X (1 socket with 16 physical cores @3.10 GHz base, with Turbo Boost to 4.70 GHz)
  • RAM:
    • 512 GB of DDR5-4800
  • Storage:
    • 4 TB of SSD

My Coreform Laptop

  • Graphics card:
    • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU (4GB)
  • Processor:
    • 11th Gen Intel i9-11900H (1 socket with 8 physical cores @2.50 GHz base)
  • RAM:
    • 64 GB of DDR4-3200
  • Storage:
    • 2TB SSD

My Personal Desktop

  • Graphics card:
    • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER (8GB)
  • Processor:
    • 9th Gen Intel i7-9700K (1 socket with 8 physical cores @3.60 GHz base, overclocked to 4.60 GHz)
  • RAM:
    • 64 GB of DDR4-2133
  • Storage:
    • 4TB SSD

Let me know what your thoughts are on hardware for Coreform Cubit, what do you use?

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