GlobalNOW benchmark results.

[Schilling, Richard]

If this comes to the list in HTML format, I apologize in advance.  I'm
fighting with my !@#$&**&%%!@ e-mail client to send plain text messages as
plain text without HTML.

About a little more than a month ago I mentioned some benchmarking I've been
doing with Java applets that do Beowulf like processing.  For those of you
who forgot or are new, this was an experiment done to benchmark a Network of
Workstations (NOW) cluster that runs on Java applets in standard web
browsers.  A complete description of the project and the software I
developed for it is at http://www.nationalinformatics.com/GlobalNOW.  

Well, I'm done gathering the results for the first test, which lasted a
month, and they can be found here: 

http://www.nationalinformatics.com/GlobalNOW/results.csv

and a description of the fields in the file can be found here

http://www.nationalinformatics.com/GlobalNOW/fields.txt

We had some really interesting results.  Here's a summary:

One calculation is defined as the addition of two randomly generated real
numbers of double word size.  The algorithm that does each calculation is
composed of at least 18 instructions (assignments, comparisons, etc . . . ).

The peak performance by a single workstation was 251,288 calculations per
second.

The peak performance in a given hour was on November 29, 2000 between 10:00
AM and 10:59 AM.  We had 387,310,620 calculations.  Thats about  6,455,177
calculations per minute, and about  107,586 calculations per second.  This
translates to about  1,936,553 instructions per second.  

We're certainly not breaking any speed records yet, but remember this was
achieved with only 
7,300 visits to the web site over a period of about one month.  Imagine what
would happen if this were done on Yahoo! or NASA's web site.

If you're interested in trying this out yourself let me know.

Thanks to everyone who helped to do the benchmarking by visiting the web
site!

Richard Schilling
Web Integration Programmer
Affiliated Health Services
Mount Vernon, WA


> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Cownie [mailto:jcownie at etnus.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 11:43 AM
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: PGI acquired by ST microelectronics.
> 
> 
> 
> Since I believe that many folks use PGI's Fortran compilers on their
> Beowulfen I thought the list might be interested in this :-
> 
>   Geneva, December 19, 2000 - STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) today
>   announced an agreement to acquire Portland Group Inc (PGI), a vendor
>   of compilers and software development tools to the high-performance
>   parallel computing market. ST will invest $17.1 million to acquire
>   full ownership of PGI's operations, including the product portfolio,
>   know-how and technologies developed by the company. Based 
> in Portland,
>   Oregon, PGI is a privately held company that has been 
> operating for 10
>   years and has world-class expertise in advanced computing
>   architectures and bringing parallel compiler technologies into
>   production on the world's fastest parallel supercomputers.
> 
> ... etc ...
> 
  http://eu.st.com/stonline/press/news/year2000/c917d.htm

Where this leaves the Linux products is extremely unclear. ST seem to
want the people and compiler technology for their embedded processors.
The press release makes no mention at all of PGI's commodity compiler
business.

As yet there's nothing on www.pgroup.com at all.

Enjoy.

-- Jim 

James Cownie	<jcownie at etnus.com>
Etnus, LLC.     +44 117 9071438
http://www.etnus.com

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