Recommend Pc Setup for Large-Scale Excel Number Crunching Project

Hello,

I wonder if you can help me to build the perfect PC setup for the following task:

I am going to perform daily financial market analysis on multiple instruments using Excel (large workbooks around 300 and 500 mbs), Matlab and Automation software. The price will be loaded into Excel, the results would be fed into Matlab to create charts (this sequence will be repeated many times). I plan to sell the resultant analysis at my website for a set monthly subscription – so this can be considered a production workstation. The total process would take 5-7 hours daily. I need this process to run as error-free as possible – absolutely predictably on autopilot. So I am not planning to over-clock the CPU.

I am deciding between a workstation built on Intel Core i7-3930K or the one built on single Intel Xeon E5-2630 or Intel Xeon E3-1275 V2. These CPUs are roughly the same in price (same number of cores, different speed though) with the I7 being much faster one. But I am more concerned with reliability and stability of this setup. Do you think the ECC memory can help eliminate system crashes when the analysis job is running? I need to be able to connect this PC remotely to initiate the analysis jobs as well. I am also thinking of Intel Core i7-3930K which is very fast but not sure about its stability for long-duration number crunching sessions (it can overheat if run at full speed for many hours?).

I might setup 4 virtual machines each to run a separate image of the EXCEL+MATLAB+PIPELINE……I wonder which PC you would recommend for such a setup?

Please let me know what you think,

Dave

If you think this setup will require much reading and writing to an hdd disk perhaps you should get a SSD to speed up things?

Alf

thank you for your reply.....I will think more about adding the VMS - with excel 2003 each running in one WinXP VM - this can be really fast to parallelize....I will combine the analytics from the separate VMS in the host machine.....the individual analysis could be done in excel 2003 but aggregating analysis and post-production woudl be done in excel 2010 which allows much more than the 2 gb of memory...software errors are likely but mos dependent on excel and matlab and vmware...I will test this setup and if it is suitable for daily work will stick with it - if no - will do all in sequence on the host machine...I am stuck with excel for now as taking it to an executable code would add a year to the project....do you think EXCEL 2010 on 4 cores will run faster than EXCEL 2003 on one core?

do you think EXCEL 2010 on 4 cores will run faster than EXCEL 2003 on one core?

Probably as Excel2010 seems to be able to take advantage of "multi thread" calculatins. See link below where text starts with "Figure 3. Advanced calculation options"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...ffice.14).aspx

Alf

yes thanks - that was very helpful!)

I wonder if any one with i7 3930K or XEON E3 127V2 can comment on the multi-threading boost to EXCEL 2010 or EXCEL 2007 performance???? I need this to make the final decision between these two setups...do you think the multi-threaded EXCEL 2010 in the case of i7 3930K or XEON E3 127V2 can be significantly faster than the single threaded EXCEL 2003?
thanks a lot!)