Intel C++ and Fortran compiler and Athlon MP...

[John Burton]

Greetings,

I am in the process of upgrading a small Beowulf cluster. The current 
cluster has 8 1U processing nodes with dual 1GHz Pentium III processors 
on a SuperMicro 370DER motherboard and 2GB of RAM.  I will be getting a 
1U APPRO 1124 which has dual AthlonMP 1900+ processors and 2GB of RAM as 
an evaluation unit in the next couple of weeks.  I am expecting some 
speedup and will be using application code to do some realistic 
benchmarking. Part of the application codes uses the BLAS and LAPACK 
libraries. I am also looking at the Intel compilers to help improve 
performance.  My questions for this group are:

    * Does anyone have any experience / comments on the ATLAS subroutine
      libraries on Intel vs. Athlon systems?
    * Same question, except Intel vs. GCC compilers?
    * Would the standard BLAS libraries compiled under the Intel
      compilers approach the performance of the ATLAS libraries?
    * Does anyone have any experience / comments on the APPRO 1124 box?
      I've seen some comments here about heat dissipation problems for
      1U dual athlon systems, is this the system in question?

Basically I'm looking at 3 variables (subroutine libraries, 
architecture, and compiler) with two possible values each. From that I'm 
trying to come up with the best combination for my particular 
application set.  Anyone have any thoughts? comments?

John

-- 
John Burton, Ph.D.
Principal Associate              GATS, Inc.  
j.c.burton at gats-inc.com          11864 Canon Blvd. - Suite 101
jcb at visi.net (personal)          Newport News, VA 23606
(757) 873-5920 (voice)           (757) 873-5924 (fax)