Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 03:05:01 02/21/03
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On February 20, 2003 at 20:06:01, Robert Pawlak wrote: >Hi Everyone, > >I am on the verge of buying a new computer at work. However, I do quite a bit of >heavy computation, and have a need to run modeling jobs that take days to >complete. My current system gets a bit sluggish when I do this, and so I have >been thinking about one of the following: > >Dual Xeon >Dual Athlon MP >3 GHz P4 with HT >OS: WinXP > >The software I run in the background is very integer intensive. The are times >also when I run floating point intensive stuff as well. And of course, the >models consume gobs of memory. So you see the similarities to your typical chess >engine with large hash (at least for integer stuff). > >The application I am using will only run in a single thread. My concern is not >so much about MIPS, but about whether the machine is still usable while my jobs >are running in the background. > >Base on my limited understanding of hyperthreading, it looks like it might be an >ok alternative. But I have no idea how well it will perform for my needs. I >included it because it has the potential to be the best performer. The dual Xeon >seems interesting to me as well, since it would give me four logical processors >:-). I also think Intel might be my better choice because of the larger memory >bandwidth. > >Does anyone have any practical experience they'd like to share on this topic? > >Thanks, >Bob If you're concerned about doing other things while running jobs, SMP gives a greater padding. Hyperthreading will compete with the running job and slow it down a little. I don't know that it would be a big deal; it probably wouldn't be if you didn't do anything computationally-intensive in the second thread. The current Xeons do have more memory bandwidth than AthlonMP, but that is all about to change. Opteron releases in roughly 59 days. It will have more memory bandwidth (2.7 GB/sec per processor), lower memory latency, and it is a 64-bit machine. If you are able to recompile the modelling program for x86-64, you will see an additional increase in performance on Opteron. -Matt
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