[Beowulf] 64bit comparisons

[Laurence Liew]

Hi Jonathan

1) But 1 or 2 nodes of each platform and test with your apps to see
- do they work on G5/Linux or G5/Mac OS
- which gives best price/performance

2) MPI
- depends on your budget for the interconnect
- Quadrics, Myrinet, Infiniband are all candidates
- your performance requirements and budget will determine which one 
suits best

3) IO
- notice you did not mention anything about IO
- spend some time thinking about IO
- depending on your needs you may need a parallel filesystem or a simple NAS


Hope this helps.

Cheers!
Laurence


Hujsak, Jonathan T (US SSA) wrote:
> *Hi!*
> 
> * *
> 
> *We’re looking at implementing a large G5 cluster here at BAE Systems.*
> 
> * *
> 
> *Have you gained any new ‘lessons learned’ since the communication *
> 
> *below? Can you recommend a good version of MPI to use for these?*
> 
> *We’ve been looking at MPICH, MPIPro and also the Apple xgrid…*
> 
> * *
> 
> *Thanks!*
> 
> * *
> 
> *Jonathan Hujsak*
> 
> *BAE Systems*
> 
> *San Diego*
> 
> * *
> 
> *Bill Broadley* bill at cse.ucdavis.edu 
> <mailto:beowulf%40beowulf.org?Subject=%5BBeowulf%5D%2064bit%20comparisons&In-Reply-To=200405141644.i4EGi1Aq023213%40marvin.ibest.uidaho.edu>
> /Fri May 14 //11:48:21 PDT// 2004/
> 
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 09:44:01AM -0700, Robert B Heckendorn wrote:
> 
>>/ One of the options we are strongly considering for our next cluster is/
> 
>>/ going with Apple X-servers.  There performance is purported to be good/
> 
>  
> 
> Careful to benchmark both processors at the same time if that is your
> 
> intended usage pattern.  Are the dual-g5's shipping yet?  Last I heard
> 
> yield problems were resulting in only uniprocessor shipments.  My main
> 
> concern that despite the marketing blurb of 2 10GB/sec CPU interfaces
> 
> or similar that there is a shared 6.4 GB/sec memory bus.
> 
>  
> 
>>/ and their power consumption is small./
> 
>  
> 
> Has anyone measured a dual g5 xserv with a kill-a-watt or similar?
> 
>  
> 
>>/ Can people comment on any comparisons betwee Apple and (Athlon64/
> 
>>/ or Opteron)?/
> 
>  
> 
> Personally I've had problems, I need to spend more time resolving them,
> 
> things like:
> 
> *       Need to tweak /etc/rc to allow Mpich to use shared memory
> 
> *       Latency between two mpich processes on the same node is 10-20 times the 
> 
>     linux latency.  I've yet to try LAM.
> 
> *   Differences in semaphores requires a rewrite for some linux code I had
> 
> *   Difference in the IBM fortran compiler required a rewrite compared to code
> 
>     that ran on Intel's, portland group's, and GNU's fortran compiler.      
> 
>  
> 
> Given all that I'm still interested to see what the G5 is good at and under
> 
> what workloads the G5 wins perf/price or perf/watt.
> 
>  
> 
> -- 
> 
> Bill Broadley
> 
> Computational Science and Engineering
> 
> UC Davis
> 
>  
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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