On Thu, 8 Nov 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
Vincent,
That's tough for me to answer, presumably the 1.5 is cheaper per hertz
in power than a 3 GHz, but because of the other issues it may not be
cheaper in GFLOPS per power. No hablo EE.
As I said in my longer reply, total system power costs per IP or FLOP
are probably going to be much higher for the smaller system. Desktop systems
typically draw 80-120 watts per CPU almost independent of clock speed,
varying according to load. I haven't measured the AMD-64 and don't know
what CPU is involved in the WalMart box, but I'm guestimating 100W each,
with the AMD as noted 3-4x faster, so there IS a considerable cost
differential in the power per useable instruction. Unless, of course,
I'm wrong. Kill-a-watt time. A measurement is worth a thousand
estimates.
rgb
Peter
On Nov 8, 2007 1:58 PM, Vincent Diepeveen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
For a compute cluster wouldn't it be a thought to also consider the
cost of 3 years of nonstop electricity for the amount of gflops it
delivers?
Vincent
On Nov 8, 2007, at 6:36 PM, Peter St. John wrote:
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
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Robert G. Brown
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
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