[petsc-users] CPU selection

[Jed Brown]

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.
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