[Bioclusters] SGI Altics or Beowulf w/OpenMOSIX?

Rayson Ho bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Sun, 7 Mar 2004 08:05:42 -0800 (PST)


--- Joe Landman <landman@scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> For this application and numerous other similar ones, the x86_64
> architecture would be a better choice than the IA64 architecture.

Yes, interger code tends to be less predictable than floating point
code, and the IA64 (or VLIW or EPIC) requires very predictable code or
else the performance would be really bad...

The Itanium performance was really bad: 4 years ago when I was porting
code onto it, I felt that it was a bit slower than the then state of
the art PC.

Then Itanium 2 generation 1 was a bit better, but not as good as other
RISC processors. So Intel added a massive 6MB on-chip L3, and tuned the
compilers, and the performance looks better.

However, for not so well know benchmarks, Opterons and the Apple G5s
are still faster, and also they are cheaper and use less energy.

Rayson


> This said, please lets refrain from architecture bashing.  IA64 is
> well
> suited for specific applications, though most tend to be outside of
> informatics, as informatics codes tend to fare well on CPUs with
> excellent integer performance, speculative execution, and
> out-of-order
> capability.  As it turns out, Opterons and similar x86_64-like
> architectures are quite well suited to these codes.
> 
> 
> > Rayson
> > 
> > --- "Jonathan B. Horen" <horen@mail.iucc.ac.il> wrote:
> > > IIRC, most bioinformatics jobs are of the
> "embarrassingly-parallel" 
> > > variety, and better suited to a COTS-cluster running GNU/Linux
> with
> > > the OpenMOSIX extensions.
> > 
> > 
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> -- 
> Joe Landman <landman@scalableinformatics.com>
> 
> _______________________________________________
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