[Beowulf] Recent comparisons of 1600 MHz external Harpertown vs.235x AMD processors?

[Tom Elken]

 > From: Mark Hahn [mailto:hahn at mcmaster.ca] 

> >                                         8-thread
> >                                       STREAM Copy (GB/s)
> > Harpertown -                           ----------------
> > Xeon 5410, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB:           6.2
> > Xeon 5472, 3.0  GHz, 1600 MHz FSB:           7.3
> > Barcelona -
> > Opteron 2352, 2.1 GHz:                      15.7
> > (the 3 other STREAM components were pretty similar to Copy)
> 
> very nice.  it would be good to know the memory configuration.

Very good point.  The faster Xeon has faster memory too.

2x Xeon 5410:    16GB Reg ECC DDR2-667 FBDIMM memory
2x Xeon 5472:    16GB Reg ECC DDR2-800 FBDIMM memory
2x Opteron 2352: 16GB ECC Reg. DDR2-667 SDRAM memory

8 dimms in the Xeon systems, not sure about the Opteron.

-Tom

> 
> of course, the real question is how well Nehalem will do - 
> does anyone have numbers?  it's a sticky time for specifying 
> clusters, since current Intel chips have great onchip performance
> but are dramatically constrained in decent-sized HPC apps. 
> choosing AMD, while defensible based on current memory performance, 
> looks extremely iffy otherwise.  (the most recent AMD disclosures 
> have them attempting to milk the k10 core for the next couple 
> years (!).)
>