It is too bad this important work needed to be done on the cheap. You'd think if the Swiss National Bank was involved, you could get a proper budget....

It would have been a lot easier to focus on the important implementation details if the server was an off the shelf Lenovo datacenter server (SD550?) with a pair of 100 gig/s NVIDIA cards in it.

(Source: last month I set up a machine like this for a colleague to do approximately the same task. I spent "copy and paste the production server config" time on it, not a week.)