What will you be doing with this PC? Be as specific as possible, and include specific games or programs you will be using.

Hi All - I am a Mechanical Engineering student on the Formula race car team at Oregon State University and we are looking to build our own server(s) to host our CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations. Right now we use donated server time from a number of sources or we pay the school and they limit us to 8 cores. We currently use Star-CCM but have recently been donated Mentor Graphics' sweet of software.

What is your maximum budget before rebates/shipping/taxes?

Our max budget depends on how much grant much we are able to secure for the purpose. Currently we have $10,000 with an additional $15,000 possible. I would like to see what builds are possible in the $5K, $10K and $25K ranges.

When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Note: beyond a week or two from today means any build you receive will be out of date when you want to buy.

Ideally we can buy the parts and assemble the computer(s) in the next 2 months.

What, exactly, do you need included in the budget? (Tower/OS/monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc)

All we need is the computer specced. We have all of the peripherals necessary to operate (mouse, keyboard, monitor)

Which country (and state/province) will you be purchasing the parts in? If you're in US, do you have access to a Microcenter location?

We are in Central Oregon, but we can drive as far North as Seattle or as far South as Northern California to pick up parts.

If reusing any parts (including monitor(s)/keyboard/mouse/etc), what parts will you be reusing? Brands and models are appreciated.

We will be using HP or Dell Monitors, keyboards, mice etc. Whatever the school has in surplus.

Will you be overclocking? If yes, are you interested in overclocking right away, or down the line? CPU and/or GPU?

Overclocking is optional. We really would like a very reliable machine which won't require regular maintenance from IT.

Are there any specific features or items you want/need in the build? (ex: SSD, large amount of storage or a RAID setup, CUDA or OpenCL support, etc)

We would prefer a Raid setup which can store ~4TB of data currently and could be expanded to ~8TB in the future. This data takes thousands of hours to generate, so ideally the Raid array is as robust as possible. We do have off-site storage, but it is very slow and cannot be used to access data quickly (think 10s MB connection).

Do you have any specific case preferences (Size like ITX/microATX/mid-tower/full-tower, styles, colors, window or not, LED lighting, etc), or a particular color theme preference for the components?

No specific case. Professional looking or Gamer-fied - we don't care. Could be rack mountable - we'll just fab a rack for it in the machine shop - 0$ cost there for us.

Do you need a copy of Windows included in the budget? If you do need one included, do you have a preference?

We have access to any windows software to use for this machine.

Extra info or particulars:

We plan on queueing jobs on this machine and have it run 24/7 until it dies or gets replaced. :). Our team has managed to do quite well in the competition and we think much of our success comes from doing a good job in understand the aerodynamics of our cars. I would call myself a pretty technical adept person, but the realm of $5K CFD computers is beyond my simplistic understanding of computers. I have full confidence that we could assemble anything that comes through our doors. I tried a few times on PCPartPicker and I have realized that I am simply out of my comfort zone one the price of a PC goes above the $2K mark. If you would like to check out our cars, here is a link to the Team page, Facebook page and YouTube page. Thank you in advance for any and all help and I am of course happy to answer any further questions someone might have!