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Subject: Re: Eugene, etc. Hardware question.

Author: Matthew White

Date: 19:07:39 04/02/03

Go up one level in this thread


On April 02, 2003 at 17:59:49, Pavel Blokhine wrote:

>On April 02, 2003 at 13:30:16, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>Vincent noticed something I had not paid much attention to and it caused me to
>>run a few
>>tests to see what was going on.  He noticed that the two-thread NPS was _way_
>>less than
>>what it should be.  Here is what I tried.
>>
>>First, on my old quad 700, I first ran a single instance of Crafty on a single
>>test position
>>to get the NPS.  I re-ran it immediately to be sure that the initial paging
>>startup did not
>>affect the number.
>>
>>I then ran two instances of crafty on the same position, to see if two
>>independent threads
>>slow things down at all.
>>
>>Finally I ran a two-thread run on the same position to see what happened to the
>>NPS there.
>>
>>I repeated this experiment on my dual 2.8 with hyper-threading disabled in the
>>BIOS so
>>that linux thinks there are two cpus, not four.
>>
>>Here is what I found:
>>
>>On my dual 2.8, a single thread gets 1009K nodes per second on this particular
>>position.
>>Running two separate processes drops this to 993K which is minimal.  This means
>>that
>>the two processors are not running into each other trying to get to memory, for
>>example.
>>Finally I got 1529K when running two threads, where the reasonable number would
>>be
>>very close to 2000K.
>>
>>On my quad 700, a single thread gets 284K nodes per second, two separate
>>processes get
>>284K each, and the parallel run with two threads gets 546K.
>>
>>The quad looks perfectly normal and appears to be what I would expect.  the dual
>>numbers
>>really seem odd.  In fact, the dual numbers look exactly like some of the AMD
>>numbers we
>>discussed a few months back.  Except that two separate processes look normal,
>>but one
>>process, two threads is only about 75% of the speed of two separate processes.
>>I'm looking,
>>but I wonder if anyone has any observations?  Crafty does very few locks.  In
>>these tests,
>>for example, it only did 300 splits which is minimal when compared to the time
>>taken.  Since
>>I factor _out_ the time used for splitting and spinning, it would appear that
>>things are simply
>>slowed down because of the shared virtual address space, which doesn't make much
>>sense to
>>me when it works on my quad 700 but fails so badly on the dual 2.8.
>>
>>More as I try to figure out what the hardware is doing...
>
>
>How much RAM of memory do you recommend to have for a dual Dell Xeon 3.06 GHZ?

The usual answer to this question (without regard to OS) is "How much can you
afford?"

Matt



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