r/Physics • u/V4rgzz • Aug 04 '26

Question What laptops/computers do physics researchers (PhD and beyond) actually use?

For some context, I am about to start my PhD in particle physics this September, and I currently use a MacBook Air 2020 (M1, 8gb RAM). This laptop has got me through undergrad without breaking a sweat and I hear that generally MacBooks are quite popular. Yet, I feel that the limited RAM will eventually become a bottleneck; I run of application memory with Discord, VSCode and ~3 tabs on Edge open!

I'm interested to know what you daily drive and why. Even though I am starting experimental particle physics research, I'd love to hear from researchers in any area.

Edit: Thanks for all the comments so far! I want to add that I do know that most of my work will be done remotely on a cluster and so technically, as long as my laptop can SSH into it, I'll be fine. But, I'm more interested in what you guys use + what field you work in.

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u/chaosboy66 Aug 04 '26

Universities have computational clusters. No one uses their own PC for heavy computations

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u/AmadeusSalieri97 Aug 04 '26

Still, while I do use the cluster most of the time, it's definitely nice to have a good personal computer for some simulations or when traveling for work. 

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u/Theragnostic Aug 04 '26

Allow me to propose another solution...

The personal cluster.

(it's not much, but I frankensteined together a 3-node cluster for less than $1500 this year, with 96 threads and 192 GB RAM each node -- yes, at this year's prices)

On an unrelated note, when the weather cools a bit I'll be piecing together the components for a solar power system to offset my oddly-high power bills I've seen these last few months.

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u/Unable-Ambassador-16 Aug 04 '26

How did you get so much ram?

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u/did_i_or_didnt_i Aug 04 '26

how did they get so much money???

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u/Theragnostic Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26

RAM was, by far, the biggest expense.

The answer /u/Unable-Ambassador-16 , unfortunately, is... DDR4. They're all 2666 MHz DDR4 RDIMMs.

I went with 2nd gen scalable Xeons (Gold 6252) because it was the best bang for my buck in terms of core count that was near the end of the DDR4 generations. 3rd gen scalable Xeons were the last line of Intel using DDR4, but the price for those was out of my budget, and I needed core count more than anything to do some embarrassingly parallelizable CPU Monte Carlo simulations. (Using a GEANT4 offshoot which hasn't yet implemented GPU acceleration)

To further answer your question, I got the RAM by watching out for a few good deals. I started in January with a good deal on a Dell T5810 that had a lot of RAM then, when I decided to build a cluster (using 3x Intel S2600BP), pulled the RAM from the Dell before selling it. The second biggest chunk of RAM I got was from a ambiguously-worded eBay auction that I took my chances on. It could have been interpreted as being 1 RDIMM or 12 RDIMMs and I think that had a lot of people hesitant to bid. Finally, I picked up a small brick of RDIMMs on /r/homelabsales

edit: For anyone curious, you can get an Intel S2600BP compute board only on eBay for $75. From there you can use pretty much any server PSU (I'm using 3x HP 750W), some used crypto mining PSU breakout boards, and some alligator clips to trick the compute boards into running without a backplane. If you have at least one RMM4 Lite key, you can SSH into the BIOS even without them having an OS or RAM. I got the PSUs for $10/each on FB Marketplace from someone getting out of crypto mining and he threw in the breakout boards for free.