[petsc-users] CPU selection

[Gong Ding]

2011/10/24 Gong Ding<gdiso at ustc.edu>
Hi all
We'd like to buy one more computation node for TCAD simulation.
The simulation code is based on petsc, 90% of the time spend on linear solver.
Krylov solvers such as BCGS/GMRES and MUMPS solver are mostly used.
Now we have two choise, one is based on Intel XEON E5620 (4 Core) and
the othre is based on AMD Opteron 6128 (8 Core).
The tow CPUs are nearly at the same price.
For sparse linear algebra, you are buying memory bandwidth. In this case, the Xeon has 3 channels of DDR3-1066 for an aggregate bandwidth of 25.5 GB/s where as the 6128 has 4 channels of DDR3-1333 for an aggregate bandwidth of 42.6 GB/s. Note however, that you are probably less likely to fully utilize the bandwidth on the Opteron because it has a deeper NUMA hierarchy. It's probably still faster, but probably not by much. If you get the Opteron, be sure to get a motherboard that supports DDR3-1333 and actually get the fast memory.
Thank you. I will consider Opteron system.
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