Patrick Geoffray wrote:
Recently, I have been thinking about something that you may like. With
motherboards with 4 good PCIE slots coming on the marketing (driven by
SLI and such), it could be doable to have a reasonably sized machine,
let's say 64 nodes, with 4 different interconnects in it. If Intel or
AMD (or any good will) would donate the nodes, and the interconnect
vendors would donate NICs + switch + cables, and a academic or
governmental entity would volunteer to host it, you could have a testbed
accessible by people to do benchmarking. The deal would be: you can use
the test bed but you have to allow your benchmark code to be available
to everyone and the code will be run on all interconnects and the
results public.
What do you think of that ?
It's every MPI/compiler/... implementor's fantasy (including me), but
unfortunately, it won't happen.
SPEC benchmarking is an example for this. The advantage of SPEC is that you only
need one machine to reproduce the results, not a whole cluster. This does of
course mean such a reference cluster is even more important from the purely
technical or scientific perspective.
It won't happen partly for cost reasons: you need not only the hardware, but
also manpower and other running costs. You need to update the cluster once or
even twice a year to be always on the edge of technology - other numbers are not
interesting for marketing. No marketing interest, no funding.
But mostly because the vendors want to make sure they get "the right" numbers
for their evil whitepapers. Not that I assume that any vendor will actually
publish fake numbers, but every vendor wants to make sure that the numbers are
the best numbers possible, and needs his own people to ensure this.
--
Joachim - reply to joachim at domain ccrl-nece dot de
Opinion expressed is personal and does not constitute
an opinion or statement of NEC Laboratories.
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