[Fwd: Benchmarking Beowulf]

[Greg Lindahl]

> Our Pentium II 400 MHz CPUs reach 298 Mflop/s using ATLAS
> (http://www.icase.edu/coral/Jan12.99.html).
> ATLAS results represent reachable peak performance but most codes cannot
> run that fast.  (Sca)LAPACK numbers reach about 165 Mflop/s (DGEMM), but
> even that is not typical.  A complete parallel code (such as a CFD
> solver) might average 45 Mflop/s/CPU, which is pretty good.

If you're interested in a comparison to Alphas, I often get 200-350
Mflop/s on CFD codes on the latest 21264 @ 500 mhz. Price/performance
makes the final decision, of course.

-- greg