Joseph Landman wrote: > On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 09:23, Donald Becker wrote: > > > Our customers started receiving their first commercial HP Itanium 2 > > systems late last week. > > > > Prior to that, all of the previous Itanium 2 system were at a tiny number > > high-profile, well-publicized sites with special agreements. There were > > no quiet users with unbiased opinions running a cluster that you just > > didn't hear about. > > I am concerned about the performance issues on bioinformatics codes. > Early versions of the chip (including the Itanium 1) had some ... > problems ... with performance on common informatics applications. This > certainly may have been due to compiler quality, as the Itanium series > performance is tremendously sensitive to the ability of the compiler to > optimize for the chip. I think an aspect of this is the specint performance of the CPUs. The Itanium 1 did not have stellar specint performance at all (rather pathetic actually). The Itanium2 has better specint performance but it's not all that great as well. Intel gives a specint base number of 810 (I didn't see anything about compilers, OS, MB, etc.). Looking around on spec.org we can see the following numbers: Athlon XP2600+: 813 Intel P4/2.26: 818 Intel P4/2.4: 852 Intel P4/2.8: 976 Intel P3/1.0: 442 Intel P3/1.13: 461 Intel P3/1.26: 611 Intel P3/1.4: 648 One can see that consumer CPUs can easily beat the Itanium2 on specint performance. Of course, specfpu is a different story, but I'll wager the typical Bio codes are very heavily dominated by specint performance :) > > > I know that Intel released a new set of compilers. I dont have an > Itanium 2 to do some BLASTs these days, so I can't really test the newer > systems. Hopefully someone can. > > > As is usual in this type of product roll-out, the lead systems vendor > > (HP) will have weeks or months of near-exclusive delivery. The tier-2 > > vendors will get only a few sample systems. > > True. HP is pushing these pretty hard everywhere. Unfortunately I > don't know how good a fit they are for string comparison codes (lots of > bioinfo) with small amounts of statistics. HP is being VERY aggressive. I have first hand knowlege of this. > > > -- > Joseph Landman, Ph.D > Scalable Informatics LLC > email: landman@scalableinformatics.com > web: http://scalableinformatics.com > phone: +1 734 612 4615 > > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters@bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters -- Jeff Layton Senior Engineer Lockheed-Martin Aeronautical Company - Marietta email: jeffrey.b.layton@lmco.com "Is it possible to overclock a cattle prod?" - Irv Mullins