[Beowulf] Thought that this might be of interest

[Greg Lindahl]

On Sun, Nov 05, 2006 at 06:38:25PM -0500, Joe Landman wrote:

> Since they wish to do it only for Intel processors, and the world 
> is decidedly mixed, this has implications on the use of Intel compilers 
> for lots of people wishing to get the best performance on all platforms 
> with a single compiler tool.  Doesn't it.

I will note that on Woodcrest & Core2 cores, the PathScale compilers
do (relatively speaking) a lot better than on previous Intel cpus.
So there's an option.

Also, anyone benchmarking Woodcrest vs. Opteron should be sure to run
on all the cores in the system, not just one, unless your real
production runs only use 1 core/node. One common situation with
Woodcrest is that the single-core performance beats everyone else, but
scaling to using all the cores in your node is less than the
competition. So the final answer is extremely application dependent.

Some codes are also outliers, for example Fluent on Woodcrest does
great, if I remember correctly.

-- greg