[Beowulf] AMD 6100 vs Intel 5600

[Alex Chekholko]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 08:59:10 +0100
Peter Kjellstrom <cap at nsc.liu.se> wrote:

> My experience is that in HPC it always boils down to price/performance and 
> that would in my eyes make apples out of Magnycour and Westmere.

Here's an example system you can build with the new hardware:

SuperMicro 1042G-TF + 4 x AMD 6134 + 32 x 4GB sticks 
= ~$9560 
for 32 cores, 128GB RAM in 1U (1400W)

That sure is compelling, especially since I'm still running racks of
Opteron 270 4-core 4GB RAM nodes.


"sweet spot" analysis: the 8GB sticks are much more than 2x expensive
compared to 4GB sticks (which are less than 2x as expensive as 2GB
sticks). The AMD 6172 is more than 2x the price of the AMD 6134 and it
gets you 50% more cores, at lower clock. 

The new AMD 6100-series SuperMicro chassis are priced linearly:
$700/$1100/$1600 for 1P, 2P, 4P. So getting the 4P chassis with 4 CPUs
is cheaper than 4 1P chassis or 2 2P chassis.

I think this is an unusual situation, historically speaking.

Regards,
-- 
Alex Chekholko   chekh at genomics.upenn.edu