Newbie - help. Cluster specifications for ls-dyna.

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 at 2:37pm, Robin Laing wrote

> Our cluster will be running ls-dyna and is presently based on Scyld 
> Beowulf software.
> 
> I am looking at dual Xeon or Athlon processors.  The Athlons are a 
> lower cost option but I have concerns about the Floating point 
> differences between each processor.  I have searched the web and found 
> that each has it's own benefits and can depend on the type of application.

ISTR an article comparing Xeons and Athlons with DYNA... ah:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=55000490

By that report, the Athlon 1800 beat out a 2GHz Xeon by a decent margin.  
Of course, we don't know what type of sim that was -- if memory bandwidth 
comes into play, the Xeon may take the lead again.  Your best bet may be 
to contact LSTC and/or find some systems to benchmark.

Note that I only have experience with DYNA on single nodes -- I haven't 
played with mpp-dyna yet.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University