[Bioclusters] SGI Altix benchmarking whitepaper

[Tim Cutts]

On 6 Feb 2006, at 3:19 pm, Chris Dagdigian wrote:
>
>> Results of the tests revealed that the SGI Altix 330 using shared
>> memory and unmatched I/O throughput achieved superior
>> performance and ran faster than twice the number of cores in
>> comparable AMD dual core Opteron-based systems.

They also chose fairly slow Opterons (2.2GHz).  They've chosen a set  
of applications (FP-intense MPI codes) which are bound to favour  
Altix-like architectures, and the Itanium2.  Plus the observations  
others have already made.  For integer based and embarrassingly  
parallel workloads where the interconnect doesn't matter so much, the  
difference will be much smaller, and probably in Opteron's favour.

But all that aside, I still want to ask the question:  how much more  
does the 16-way Altix 330 cost than the 8-way dual core Opteron?   
What's the price-performance?

Tim

-- 
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5  860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233