[Beowulf] Theoretical vs. Actual Performance

[John Hearns]

Prentice, I echo what Joe says.
When doing benchmarking with HPL or SPEC benchmarks, I would optimise the
BIOS settings to the highest degree I could.
Switch off processor C) states
As Joe says you need to look at what the OS is runnign in the background. I
would disable the Bright cluster manager daemon for instance.


85% of theoretical peak on an HPL run sounds reasonable to me and I would
get fogures in that ballpark.

For your AMDs I would start by choosing one system, no interconnect to
cloud the waters. See what you can get out of that.









On 22 February 2018 at 15:45, Joe Landman <joe.landman at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 02/22/2018 09:37 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
>
>> Beowulfers,
>>
>> In your experience, how close does actual performance of your processors
>> match up to their theoretical performance? I'm investigating a performances
>> issue on some of my nodes. These are older systems using AMD Opteron 6274
>> processors. I found literature from AMD stating the theoretical performance
>> of these processors is 282 GFLOPS, and my LINPACK performance isn't coming
>> close to that (I get approximately ~33% of that).  The number I often hear
>> mentioned is actual performance should be ~85%. of theoretical performance
>> is that a realistic number your experience?
>>
>
> 85% makes the assumption that you have the systems configured in an
> optimal manner, that the compiler doesn't do anything wonky, and that, to
> some degree, you isolate the OS portion of the workload off of most of the
> cores to reduce jitter.   Among other things.
>
> At Scalable, I'd regularly hit 60-90 % of theoretical max computing
> performance, with progressively more heroic tuning.   Storage, I'd
> typically hit 90-95% of theoretical max (good architectures almost always
> beat bad ones).  Networking, fairly similar, though tuning per use case
> mattered significantly.
>
>
>> I don't want this to be a discussion of what could be wrong at this
>> point, we will get to that in future posts, I assure you!
>>
>>
> --
> Joe Landman
> t: @hpcjoe
> w: https://scalability.org
>
>
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