[Bioclusters] SGI Altix benchmarking whitepaper

James Cuff jcuff at broad.mit.edu
Mon Feb 6 13:58:47 EST 2006


On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 10:19 -0500, Chris Dagdigian wrote:
> I'm sure that many of you also got the marketing email today entitled  
> "SGI Altix outperforms AMD Dual-core Opteron
> Systems".
> 
> Have not read the paper yet, just passing along the actual URL  to  
> the paper ...
> 
> Skipping the intro and setup pages, the actual PDF is here:

It's a really nice paper.  I have one tiny little observation.

The L3 cache of the 6MB Madison has always made a huge difference.

This is what I see as really being measured in these tests:

Opteron:  8 CPUs (16 compute cores) sharing  8x1MB L3  =  8MB
Itanium: 16 CPUs (16 compute cores) sharing 16x6MB L3  = 96MB

I'm not sure apples were compared with apples here, but I guess I'm just
picking at hairs.  However, non withstanding all this SGI's back plane
architecture is still one of the smartest designs out there for mix and
match NUMA computing.

The paper was a good read thanks for sending it round Chris.

Best,

J.



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