[Beowulf] Opteron

[Chris Samuel]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, andrew holway wrote:

> Come on then SC07'ers. Whats the buzz with barcelona?

We've had a 1.9GHz Barcelona node on our new cluster for a few months 
now (under NDA that expired on the launch) and have been happy enough 
with it to go for the full upgrade to the 2.3GHz Barcelonas starting 
in a few weeks time (as opposed to upgrading to 2.8GHz dual cores and 
adding more nodes).

We've not (yet) seen the scaling problems on it that the Intel quad's 
we tested have shown (for instance we saw no performance improvement 
on some memory hungry codes such as OpenFOAM from 4 to 8 cores - just 
a flat line).

The new Intel architecture sounds interesting, but (a) it wasn't on 
offer from anyone when we were doing our purchase and (b) the rumours 
I've heard indicate that it's going to have a shortish lifetime 
before Intel finally comes out with the new CSI/QPI (or whatever it's 
called this week) based CPUs.

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20071118/0954579b/attachment.sig>