So I am looking to put together a system to run MIlklyway@home 24/7 and wanted to know where should most of my money go. I would say that I have around 750 to spend although this would be a bit down the road from now as I need to save up. I would want this to be a rack-mounted server for a couple of reasons. One I want to learn how to work with them. The second I want to run other projects such as LHC first does this use cpu and second does having multiply CPUs help with this?. The last reason may be dumb but I enjoy these servers and I have wanted for a bit now but I would want to use it for something do you think that boinc would be a good use case for it.

MW has the highest production from older generation AMD cards like the RX 570/580 series or the Radeon VII gpu. You can run multiple tasks per gpu for example.

MW also has multi-threaded cpu tasks that utilize as many cpu threads as you can spare. So for example a single MT task might run on 8 cpu threads simultaneously.

Running both cpu and gpu tasks can get a bit tricky though. You normally would want to to run custom app_info and app_config files or separate locations or venues for sub-projects.

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Just wanted to comment on your rack mounted server requirement. I hope you realize that standard 19" rack mounted servers are normally designated by their height, i.e. 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U for example. 1U = 1.75" tall.

So, I hope you see the difficulty in installing any standard consumer gpu in such a case. The only way to install one is to lay it down in the chassis horizontally. The chassis needs mounting mechanisms that allow that. You would need a 2U height chassis to mount a standard two PCIE slot gpu horizontally.

The only standard server chassis that would allow a consumer gpu to be conventionally vertically mounted would be a 4U chassis.

Now OTOH, a server workstation has a form factor similar to a standard PC case. So fitting a gpu is not a problem.

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I was thinking about going with a desktop workstation do to a lot of things. but it all comes down to if server hardware is best for me and than at that point I will have to choose on what to go with
I will though keep the idea of a normal desktop server pc in mind.

That is nice due to lower cost hopefully. I was told to look at the FP64 of a card but is there a place where I can see benchmarks for MIlkyway@ home. for now I think I am going to run my gpu on milkyway@home as it seems to be on the most help there is this correct. and I was going to use my cpu for other projects.

You won't find any MW specific benchmarks. Best is to compare the MW Top Hosts statistics and look at what type of gpu they are running. But getting specific performance is pretty much impossible because BOINC shows aggregate values of all the cards attached to the host and you can't tell if the host is running multiple tasks simultaneously on a card when comparing compute times. Try and find a card you are interested in the host and only reporting one card attached to the host.

https://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/top_hosts.php

This list can be used to compare the FP64 performance of cards.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20140305/amd-radeon-and-nvidia-geforce-fp32-fp64-gflops-table-computing/

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