Advice Sought for Super Workstation design

[drjonesbt]

I am seeking the mother-of-all motherboards for a super-solver workstation that has to run a legacy CAE analysis software package that is limited to 32-bit databus, and single CPU.
The board must be able to provide excellent graphical display quality via PCIe cards such as Quadro 4xxx-series, (it's not so important for me once you get above a certain level, say Quadro-4600 and above.)
The solves usually take several hours, and cause massive prolonged read-write sessions to and from CPU to disk, and to and from CPU and memory (North- and South- bridge-thrashing.)

Stability is more important than speed, but speed of solution is the highest prize in this type of analysis, and is the driving factor for the design of the Workstation.

A candidate machine might look something like...
Four-slot, four channel DDR2 or 3 with four 1GBYte ultra-high speed DIMMS
Four SATA SLC-SDD's (16GB is plenty) in RAID 0 plugged into 4-channel databus mobo
Xeon -W extreme processor,
External 1TB disk drive for RAID backup ( speed good, but no extremes required.)
-anything else that might speed up massive matrix inversion and decomposition?
plus
nVidea Quadro 4600 PCIe-capable (no SLI required)
Good stable LAN on board
(Built-in sound card or PCi slot, not essential)

ANyone got any advice or ideas?

TIA

Dave Jones

 

[jaquith]

What exact "legacy" CAE analysis software are you referring to??

I noted "that is limited to 32-bit databus" -- are you suggesting the App(s) won't run on a 64-bit CPU? This is the reason I ask what application(s). All of the "W" Intel Xeon Processors W35XX or W36XX or W55XX are 64-bit and LGA 1366 http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=39718,41313,39719,39720,39721,39722,39723,47918,47917,52586,37113,41643,

Q - Have you considered the newer LGA 1155 Xeon E3-series?
Q - How many Cores do you need?
Q - What's the budget?

In any case you've got some 'unique' specs.
You want DDR3 and you should use ECC and more RAM. LGA 1366 is Tri Channel 3 X __GB. Filling ALL DIMMS is slower // Four-slot, four channel DDR2 or 3 with four 1GBYte ultra-high speed DIMMS
64GB in RAID 0 x4 is very risky the newer SSD's are 550/500 MB/s in non-RAID; yes I read the backup. There are internal RAID PCIe SSD that are both fast and more reliable. // Four SATA SLC-SDD's (16GB is plenty) in RAID 0 plugged into 4-channel databus mobo
64-bit CPU; LGA 1366 // Xeon -W extreme processor,
External 1TB disk drive for RAID backup ( speed good, but no extremes required.)
-anything else that might speed up massive matrix inversion and decomposition?
plus
Okay // nVidea Quadro 4600 PCIe-capable (no SLI required)
Intel LAN is best // Good stable LAN on board
Realtek onboard // (Built-in sound card or PCi slot, not essential)