[Beowulf] Barcelona vs. Woodcrest, computational chemistry research

[richard.walsh at comcast.net]

"andrew holway" <andrew at moonet.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> I am looking at chips for a small 20 node cluster for computational 
> chemistry. I'm trying to get my head around the various merits of the 
> different ways the cache work. 
> 
> Considering the fairly chunky bits of data that are going to be going 
> through, does anyone have any opinion on how the new 1.9 Barcelona 
> will perform against a 2.66 woodcrest. Is the Intel front side bus 
> going to be a significant bottleneck for this type of application?

Andrew,

You should be comparing Barcelona to Harpertown, and focused
on what things will look like in Q4 when Harpertown (45nm) will be out
and Barcelona "will" be available at higher clock.  Barcelona is still the 
bandwidth and latency leader, and compares close to equal on power
with the Harpertown at 45nm.  Codes that favor larger caches will
like Harpertown.  If the Barcelona makes it to 2.6 or 2.8 GHz by 
the end of the year, then it will compete.  It will win with even at lower 
clocks on very bandwidth intensive apps.

Regards,

rbw

-- 

"Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." 

Niels Bohr 

-- 

Richard Walsh 
Thrashing River Consulting-- 
5605 Alameda St. 
Shoreview, MN 55126 
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