Looking at a large project that will require lots of sims - mainly water. Curious to hear recommendations on workstation specs to handle this type of work using Houdini … number of CPUs, RAM, specific graphic cards? What about GPU capabilities? All suggestions welcomed. Thanks in advance

im not really a hardware specialist but as far as i know a memory is usually the first bottleneck. i think 32 gb is a good starting point, but you will need more to do high detail and/or large scale sims. with slower CPU your sims take more time, but with not enough ram you will not be able to process them at all. regarding graphics cards in general, i had a better performance with a strong geforce card than with quadro.

Get as much RAM as you can get, for GPU is usually better some gaming GPU then Quadro since they have faster clocks. You will probably not be able to use OpenCL on real projects, since the GPU RAM is limited. You can see big difference CPU/OpenCL in sims with lowCPU with high gaming GPU, but with high end CPU and high end GPU you will see very small difference in OpenCL.

And get very big HDD for caching, the sims are very big.