I was recently asked what kind of hardware you should for running VASP calculations. I recommend looking at the configuration of the Triolith cluster at NSC. It was designed to run VASP as big part of the workload, and we did extensive benchmarking to optimize price/performance. An alternative is too look through the supercomputing Top500 list for the most recent entries, to get a feel for what the supercomputing centers are buying at the moment. At Top500, they also have a statistics section where you can follow trends in hardware over time. It is obvious, for example, that big shared memory systems have fallen out of favor.
I recommend is dual-socket servers with low clock frequency Intel Xeon E5 processors, connected by Infiniband networking. Why?
Type of CPU: At the moment, Intel’s server processors are significantly ahead of AMD’s in terms of performance and energy efficiency. VASP is also very reliant on Intel’s Fortran compiler. This makes Intel processors an optimal choice. It is possible to run VASP on POWER and SPARC processors, but these server platforms are generally not cost efficient for high-performance computing.
CPU model: VASP is very dependent on high memory bandwidth. It is one of the most memory intensive applications in high-performance computing. This means that you do not need processors with high clock frequency, because they will spend most of their time waiting for data to arrive from memory anyhow. What you need is the cheapest processor model that still comes with maximum memory bandwidth. In the current Xeon E5-2600 series, that is likely to be the 2650 and 2660 models. The quad-core 2643 model could also be interesting, because you typically gain only 25% when going from 8 to 16 cores per node.
Memory: It is crucial to have 1600 Mhz DDR3 memory, which is currently the fastest memory (1866 Mhz will soon come). All four memory channels should be occupied. Try to get dual rank memory modules if you have only 1 DIMM per memory channel – it will improve performance by ca 5%. Typically, 32 GB of memory is enough (2 GB/core), the reason being that you can easily get an equivalent of 4 GB per core by running with half the number of MPI ranks per node without losing too much performance. But if the majority of jobs are of hybrid type or GW, I would go for 64 GB per server instead.
Network: A fast network, like Infiniband, is necessary to run VASP in parallel on more than a few nodes. It is difficult to do comparative studies of different network setups due to the amount of hardware required, but in general VASP scales almost perfectly up to 16 compute nodes using both Mellanox and Qlogic (now Intel) Infiniband, so there is no given winner. FDR Infiniband does not significantly improve performance over QDR for VASP in the few tests I was able to do (+16% on a 16 node job spanning two switches), so I would look at it mostly from a price/performance perspective.