[Beowulf] Q: AMD Opteron (Barcelona) 2356 vs Intel Xeon 5460

[Eric Thibodeau]

Sangamesh B wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
>      Recently I benchmarked a Fortran based Scientific application on 
> both Intel Xeon Quad core and AMD Opteron Quad core with RHEL 5. 
> Following are the results:
>
>                                                AMD-2.3GHz             
>                INTEL-2.33GHz
>
> 1. Serial                                   147.719 
> sec                                73.952 sec
>
> 2. Parallel 4 core                        39.798 
> sec                                32.317 sec
>
> 3. Parallel 8 core                        26.880 
> sec                                30.371 sec
I'll go ahead and assume your "Fortran based Sci app" is memory bound 
and this might be why the AMD based parallel version scales a little 
better given it's using HT as communication fabric (non-shared MMU).
>
>
>       For AMD, I used GCC compiler(gfortran), which is released by AMD 
> for its barcelona-AMD fam10 based processors.
>
>       For Intel, Intel 10 compilers.
Which compile flags were used? Also, note that I've had issues with icc 
generating really fast but inaccurate code (fp model is not IEEE *by 
default*, I am sure _everyone_ knows this and I am stating the obvious 
here).

The figures are interesting but you could get a tad higher in the 
information by using the time utility ( the one from 
http://www.gnu.org/directory/time.html ) with the -v option. This way we 
can get a hint of cache use/misses and all sorts of generally neat stuff 
(without getting into profiling).
>
> Thank you,
> Sangamesh
> Conultant-HPC
>
>  
>
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Carsten Aulbert 
> <carsten.aulbert at aei.mpg.de <mailto:carsten.aulbert at aei.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Tim,
>
>     Tim Chipman wrote:
>     > Does anyone have any 'real world' experience with 'both' of
>     these CPUs, in terms of relative performance for 'whatever work
>     you do' ?
>     >
>     > I realize the xeon is a faster mhz part (3.16ghz xeon vs 2.3ghz
>     opteron) so I'm more concerned with "relative performance per mhz"
>     >
>     > I'm involved with a cluster project, and we have 2 options from
>     our vendor,
>     >
>     > - 25 compute nodes, dual-quadcore intel 5460, or
>     > - 32 compute nodes, dual-quadcore amd 2356
>     >
>     >>From what I've been able to glean (Spec.org / SpecCPU 2006),
>     >
>     > - the intel chips have better integer performance
>     > - the amd chips have better FPU performance
>     >
>     > so the likely anticipated real-world performance result .. will
>     depend on how a given application blends / balances things.
>
>     We have "only" the Quad-Xeon boxes with E5435 and these are quite
>     fast,
>     indeed it seems that FFTW seems to run faster on Xeons but I have not
>     made any benchmarks for the past ~ 9 months, so I don't know about the
>     latest Opterons.
>
>     I think you need to come up with a real world scenario of what will be
>     run on the cluster and maybe compile a little benchmark yourself
>     ans aks
>     the vendor to run both (or get hands on on both boxes. I think that's
>     the only "fair" comparison that's possible.
>
>     HTH
>
>     Carsten
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