[Beowulf] Re: Intel quad core nodes?

[Justin Penney]

I recently ran a customer's weather modeling code on a variety of machines. This program is very sensitive to memory. The following are the run times while running 4 processes. Please note that the Xeon, Opteron and Barcelona numbers are from dual socket machines. 

  Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz - 3h16m
  Xeon Quad 2.0 GHz - 2h51m
  Barcelona 2.0 GHz - 1h40m
  Opteron 2220SE 2.8 GHz - 2h24m

At 8 processes:

  Xeon Quad 2.0 GHz - 2h52m
  Barcelona 2.0 GHz - 1h22m



Barnet Wagman wrote:
> I'm moving towards setting up a small cluster (my first), and am 
> thinking about using Intel quad core processors.  However, I'm a little 
> concerned about memory contention.  I'm (tentatively) going to have one 
> processor per node (this appears to be the cheapest way to go), but I 
> still wonder whether four cores will choke Intel's memory architecture.  
> (AMD's Barcelona may be better in this regard, but it doesn't seem to be 
> available yet, at least not through retail channels).
> 
> I'd like to hear any opinions on this issue.  And if you've used quad 
> core processors, I'd certainly like to hear about your experiences 
> (including which processor you've used).

-- 
justin penney
email: jpenney at advancedclustering.com
phone: 913.643.0300 option 2
im: http://livehelp.advancedclustering.com/