[Beowulf] ever heard of ScaleMP?

[Shai Fultheim (Shai at ScaleMP.com)]

Greg,

It is a bit difficult to use classic apple-to-apples comparison, when
there is not much to compare to.  vSMPowered systems are the largest x86
systems from both memory and core count, which makes it a bit hard to
compare.  Some data below:

1. Apples-to-apples:
 - The fastest SUN 8-proc (x4600m2) AMD machine (2.6):  STREAM OMP 9GB
 - The fastest IBM 8-proc (x3950) Intel machine (3.0):  STREAM OMP 4GB
 - vSMPowered system has linear STREAM bandwidth...  so 8-proc STREAM
OMP 27GB
2. Apples-to-oranges:
 - Comparing Itanuim-2 (not 1) and x86 when it get to large memory is
the right comparison.  After all, finding another x86 system that has
>400GB RAM is quite difficult.

I don't have SPEC OMP results, but one application I can mention that
make use of OMP is Gaussian, which is running by several customers at
better performance than other (AMD, Itanuium) platform - after
customer's apple-to-apple comparison.

I'll be happy to discuss our technology in details if you have the time.
Note that we have several contacts in common at PathScale/Qlogic that
can share more light on ScaleMP's technology.

--Shai


-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Lindahl [mailto:lindahl at pbm.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 13:25
To: Shai Fultheim (Shai at ScaleMP.com)
Cc: Beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] ever heard of ScaleMP?

On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 10:08:16PM -0500, Shai Fultheim
(Shai at ScaleMP.com) wrote:

> -          Large memory applications can use all memory - for example
> running SANDIA CUBIT with meshes over 400GB in size.  3.08x faster
than
> the customer large-scale Itanium NUMA system.

This is a classic apple-orange comparison. In order to be useful, you'd
have
to mention what the other system was -- if it's an Itanium-1 at 800 Mhz
compared to a 3.0 Ghz modern system, that matters.

But, better yet, can you just point us at a set of SPEC OMP benchmark
results? I looked at your OEM partner pages and didn't see any
benchmark results.

-- greg