[Gllug] Best option for a lot of compute power

[John Hearns]

On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 17:27, John Winters wrote:

> 
> I am therefore considering putting in a bid for a powerful multi-cpu
> workstation.  The obvious choice seems to be between a couple of
> hyperthreaded processors (giving almost 4 effective processors) or a
> couple of AMD 64 bit processors.  Given that the task is very compute
> intensive (but doesn't require much of anything else - memory or i/o)
> which would be likely to give the better performance?

I'll bite here.
We provide and support AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium and Xeon machines for
high performance computing.

I like the AMD Opteron, the architecture and the compatibility with
existing 32 bit applications. We have one site which just ran existing
32 bit codes straight off on Opteron.

My own opinion, not really backed up by anything scientific, is that
the Opteron wins on applications which shunt lots of data back and forth
from memory, due to the Hypertransport. Quad Opterons are out now, which
should make nice systems. Graphics rendering workstations,
engineering and scientific visualization will go very well on these.

However, Intel still have the edge on raw clock speed.
The 'sweet spot' in terms of price/performance for HPC at the moment is
dual Xeon systems. I'm currently commissioning a cluster with 
46 dual Xeons, each with 2 gigs of RAM.


Huw Lynes says that pound for pound Opterons are faster than Xeons.
I won't disagree - benchmarking depends on your application.
As I say above, Opterons will rock in graphics rendering.
This is getting me interested in looking up some recent benchmark
figures.
The Top 500 list is due out on 24th June, and we may well have an entry.




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