Can you actually show which software you run to get those gflops?
Actual truth currently is that the quadcores are far superior because
of the power draw in the long run for number crunching and a far bigger,
though far from 2x faster processing speed than dual cores.
for real low power number crunching of course you don't put in
harddrives, that wastes energy for nothing as well as money.
boot from usb obviously. Core2 is far superior, and barcelona core
based chips still have to show up;
AMD's oldie K8 is nowhere near the speed you need for number
crunching with double precision floating points to core2.
In all cases the power draw of those cpu's, regardless whether it's
intel or AMD, is eating up way more watts than they quote on the
internet for TDP's.
Calculating with those tdp's is quite impossible.
A quadcore 2.4Ghz machine, without harddrive, definitely when
measured with a good multimeter and a reasonable power efficient
power supply, was measured at around 170 watts.
If you replace that cpu by some other cpu, you might perhaps get away
with a tad less, but still close to that 170 watt.
For number crunching for say a year, 170 watt hammers in bigtime into
energy costs.
So putting a dualcore chip inside is a ridicioulous thought in itself.
On Nov 8, 2007, at 9:36 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
Peter,
Having some experience with low cost hardware, If you are
doing number crunching multi-core seems to provide the
best bang for buck. The following is the HPL performance that
you can get for $2500. The Kronos and Microwulf clusters
are detailed on http://clustermonkey.net, Norbert is the subject
of a November Linux Magazine article.
CPU
Cluster Name Clock Release HPL
Processor Speed (MHz) Date Performance
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Kronos/Sempron 2500+ (8) 1750 7/2004 14.90 GFLOPS (Atlas)
Microwulf/Athlon64 X2 3800+ (4) 2000 8/2005 26.25 GFLOPS (Goto)
Norbert/Core Duo E6550 (4) 2333 7/2007 45.55 GFLOPS (Goto)
If you draw a line (3 points I know) you get to 80 GFLOPS
by 2010. Actually with some tweaking I got Norbert
up to 47.7 HPL GFLOPS. And, notice I qaulify the performance
as "HPL GFLOPS" as YMMV.
With really low cost systems one important aspect is the
interconnect. The PCIe buses on low end motherboards allows
one to use inexpensive PCIe (Intel) Ethernet cards vs
32 PCI. Some of the on-board GigE implementations are
not very good.
--
Doug
Recently, probably you noticed, Walmart began selling a $200 linux
PC.
(Apparently the OS is just Ubuntu 7.10 with a small xindow manager
instead of Gnome or KDE). Now Slashdot points to
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5305482907.html, the MB being sold
separately for $60 ("development board"). It has 1.5GHz CPU,
unpopulated memory (slots for 2GB), one 10/100 connection. Does this
look to y'all like fair FLOPS/$ for a kitchen project? I'm thinking 6
of them as compute nodes per 8 port router, with a bigger head node
for fileserving. (actually I'll use a spare room but you know what I
mean). An arrangement like this might be faster RAM access per core,
compared to multicore, since each core has no competition for is't
own
memory, right?
Thanks,
Peter
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
!DSPAM:473349b8291457110611695!
--
Doug
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
