Subject: Re: CCL:New Amber speed record + PC timing

From: [email-masked] (Richard Walsh)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 94 17:21:51 -0500

Bill,

Bill you wrote:

>From time to time in the past I have sent my latest benchmarks
>for Amber (molecular mechanics) when a new machine breaks the
>speed record. The last 2 times it seesawed between supercomputer
>makers Cray and Fujitsu. Now, thanks to parallelism and the
>latest hot chip (SGI shared memory), we have a workstation that
>beats the supercomputers on raw speed.  Some parallel results for
...

I am not sure what you mean by 'raw speed' here ... could you also
report C90 parallel times or those for the T3D? It would be helpful 
and more complete to present these comparisons. My guess is that 
your benchmark would run with the most 'raw speed' on a C90 16/512 
with a T3D attached. Also, these TFP timings beg the question ... 
when does a workstation become a supercomputer? ... when it costs 
$500,000.00, $1,000,000.00. The new SGI systems with multiple CPUs 
and functionally configured can easily exceed these numbers. Around 
here anyway a workstation is something that can be purchased for 
about $50,000.

The SGI TFP performance numbers are impressive, but they should be 
presented here with as high a regard for completeness as for enthusiasm
(excepting perhaps by those selling the hardware involved :-)).

Accepting the possibility of some personal bias :-)--
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Richard Walsh                                       |
Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.   <-------------