[Beowulf] Athlon64 / Opteron test

[Joe Griffin]

Mikhail,

Compilers aren't mentioned on the performance page.  Lot's of the CPU time
is spent in a few routines which are often hand tuned in assembler.

An interesting note for this group is the dominance of Linux in the
charts.  When performance numbers for our last release were made,
MSC Posted Tru64, UNICOS, Fujitsu/UXP, HPUX, AIX, Linux,
NEC/SuperUX, IRIX, and Solaris numbers:

http://www.mscsoftware.com/support/prod_support/nastran/performance/v0109_sngl.cfm

but with this last release, most of the hardware companies submitted 
linux numbers:

http://www.mscsoftware.com/support/prod_support/nastran/performance/v04_sngl.cfm

I think this shift is worthy of notation.

Joe


Mikhail Kuzminsky wrote:

>According to Joe Griffin
>  
>
>> ... 
>>Below is a web site comparing IA32, IA64 (linux and HPUX),  Opteron
>>and an IBM P655 running AIX.   The site should only be used to
>>compare hardare platforms when running our software.   I am sure
>>that Fluent, LSTC/Dyna, Star-CD have similar sites.  I recomend
>>finding out about the software that you will be using.
>>
>>MSC.Nastran Hardware comparison:
>>
>>http://www.mscsoftware.com/support/prod_support/nastran/performance/v04_sngl.cfm
>>
>>Regards,
>>Joe Griffin
>>
>>    
>>
>  This page contains very interesting tables w/description of hardware
>used, but at first look I found only the data about OSes, not about compilers/run time libraries used. The (relative bad) data for IBM e325/Opteron 2 Ghz
>looks "nontrivial"; I beleive some interptretation of "why?" will be helpful.
>May be some applications used are relative cache-friendly and have working set
>placing in large Itanium 2 cache? 
>
>May be it depends from compiler and Math library used ? BTW, for LGQDF test:
>I/O is relative small (compare pls elapsed and CPU times which are very close);
>but Windows time for Dell P4/3.2 Ghz (4480 sec) is much more worse than
>for Linux on the same hardware (3713 sec). IMHO, in this case they
> must be very close in the case of using same comlilers&libraries
> (I don't like Windows, but this result is too bad for this OS :-))
>
>Yours
>Mikhail Kuzminsky
>Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
>Moscow
>
>
>
>  
>