[Bioclusters] altivec-HMMER bechmark results from Erik Lindahl - 6x faster than dual Athlon

chris dagdigian bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Wed, 11 Dec 2002 12:03:55 -0500


Dave Waddell wrote:
> Don't want to start a processor war but the current Intel chip is a
> 3.06GHz Pentium 4 not a 1GHz Pentium 3. IMHO, benchmark results should
> match current hardware or don't make them at all.
> 

> IMHO, benchmark results should
>> match current hardware or don't make them at all.

I agree, but:

Current hardware != fastest possible hardware, especially for this 
mailing list...

Since a huge percentage of the bioclusters that I've seen, built and 
learned about are running dual Pentium III 1U rackmount systems the 
benchmarks are real and actually useful for many people in this forum, 
especially for those who are considering purchasing hardware in the near 
term. The data is interesting enough to make some people consider 
eval'ing a G4 box in their decision process. Apple is not something one 
normally consideres when building such systems.

I already know of one boston-area cluster that will be built early next 
year that is going to go heterogenous Intel/Apple with respect to the 
compute node selection.

A general question:

How many people on this list have put life-science specific Pentium 4 
clusters into production? How many whitebox or big name vendors offer 
high-density well cooled Pentium 4 chassis at a reasonable price? I'm 
actually pretty curious as to this because it seems that the trends 
that favored lots of cheap SMP PIII boxes for our application mix are 
going away. I think the future clusters that I get involved with may be 
going single Pentium 4 for a bit or possibly dual-AMD. It will be an 
interesting few months.

I should have added the usual disclaimer though: "do your own tests if 
you want to draw real conclusions" heh.

-Chris