[Beowulf] X5500

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

So, Nehalem-EP is out, NDAs are gone, and we're all waiting for figures. :)

Being advantaged by my easterly timezone, I'll start: SGI published a press 
release about the inclusion of Nehalems into their ICE platform, and added 
some benchmark galore.

"""
Performance Soars by 140 Percent with Unprecedented Scalability
The new system delivers reliably scalable performance gains of up to 140 
percent across a variety of data-intensive applications, including the Fluent 
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application, the VASP Ab-Initio simulation, 
and WRF weather modeling.

* Fluent. A 14-million-cell model of the external flow of a truck body was 
tested on 64 cores of an Altix ICE 8200EX with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 
series at 2.93GHz. On the new SGI system, the test ran 1.59x faster than AMD 
Shanghai at 2.7GHz and 1.73x faster than Altix ICE 8200EX with Intel® Xeon® 
processor X5472 at 3.0GHz on 64 cores — with near linear scalability. For a 
larger 111-million-cell model, the performance improvement is even higher. 
Altix ICE 8200EX with Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series at 2.93GHz/1067 is 
1.64x faster than AMD Shanghai on 64 cores and 1.81x faster than Altix ICE 
8200EX with Intel® Xeon® X5472 3.0GHz on 128 cores.

* VASP. When running the bench.PdO standard benchmark for the Vienna Ab-Initio 
Simulation Package (VASP), the Altix ICE 8200EX with Intel® Xeon® processor 
5500 series at 2.93GHz on 32 cores is 1.95x faster than the same system 
equipped with Intel® Xeon® processors X5470 at 3.0GHz.

* WRF. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model of the continental 
United States at 2.5km resolution runs 2.4x faster on Altix ICE 8200EX with 
Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series at 2.93GHz on 128 cores than it does on a 
similarly configured system featuring Intel® Xeon® processors X5470 at 3.0GHz.
"""
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/march/altix_ice.html


Any other numbers, people?


Cheers,
-- 
Kilian