[SWLUG] how much more CPU performance can one get these days?

[Pete Prior]

Depends on the maths involved but maybe recode it to use a GPU, not a CPU?

See http://www.dvhardware.net/article27538.html

Excerpt:

"The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance for
their work as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors. On a normal
desktop PC their tomography tasks would take several weeks but on this
NVIDIA-based "supercomputer" it only takes a couple of hours."

Pete

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:29:03 +0100, Mark Summerfield <mark at qtrac.eu> wrote:
> On 2009-09-18, Justin Mitchell wrote:
>> On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 11:10 +0100, Mark Summerfield wrote:
> [snip]
>> of interest in this case is :-
>> 
>> si - blocks swapped into ram
>> so - blocks swapped out to disk
>> 
>> bi - disk blocks read
>> bo - disk blocks written
>> 
>> if si and so are regularly non-zero then the system is having to swap
>> things between ram and disk to satisfy all the memory requirements of
>> whats running, try and eliminate any memory hungry programs, or go buy
>> more ram.
>> 
>> small amounts of swapping on a system are generally harmless, but if its
>> your number crunching program thats having to be swapped all the time
>> then its going to be taking a massive performance penalty.
> 
> si, so, and bi, are all 0, bo ranges from 0 to low hundreds.
> 
> So it looks like it really is CPU bound so I'll just have to put up with
> it for now:-)
> 
> Thanks!