Summary: Performance of PPro



 Dear Netters,
 Many thanks for the numerous replies on my question on the performance of PPro.
 In order of appearance:
 Edgardo Garcia, Nico van Eikema Hommes, Pedro A M Vazquez, Thomas Huber, Thomas
 Wagener, John M. McKelvey, Jochen Buehler, Joe Durant, Alan Hewat, Arne
 Elofsson
 Unfortunately, there are not very much "hard facts" I could summarize.
 (A lot
 of indirect comparisons and -in my eyes (forgive me)- more or less emotional
 problems with LINUX or INTEL CPUs in general ....
 In order not to fill the bandwidth I picked out some things:
 ****************************************************************************
 On Jul 17, 10:31am, Pedro A M Vazquez wrote:
 > Subject: [COMP-CHEM] CCL:G:performance of PPro (fwd)
 > Hello
 > 	We just started to benchmark a PPro200MHz for quantum chemistry
 > calculations.
 > 	While I've not completed all sets of tests I've results for the
 > Stream benchmark (Memory bandwidth), Bonnie (I/O) and the 4 Gamess
 > benchmarks.
 > 	These results are for an Asustek Motherboard with 64M of RAM,
 > an Adaptec 2940 SCSI2 adaptor and a NEC 2.1G SCSI2 hard disk running
 > under FreeBSD2.1.0:
 >
 > Stream:(a g94 job running during the benchmark)
 >
 > Function      Rate (MB/s)   RMS time     Min time     Max time
 > Assignment:    97.5238       0.1965       0.1641       0.2109
 > Scaling   :    85.3333       0.1969       0.1875       0.2031
 > Summing   :    87.7714       0.2813       0.2734       0.2969
 > SAXPYing  :    90.3529       0.2797       0.2656       0.2891
 >
 > Just for comparision, these are the results for an Alpha Server 1000 4/266
 > DEC Unix3.2C: (idle machine)
 >
 > Function      Rate (MB/s)   RMS time     Min time     Max time
 > Assignment:    96.0000       0.1801       0.1667       0.1833
 > Scaling   :    96.0000       0.1836       0.1667       0.2000
 > Summing   :    96.0000       0.2586       0.2500       0.2833
 > SAXPYing  :    96.0000       0.2618       0.2500       0.2667
 >
 > Bonnie:
 >               -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input--
 --Random--
 >               -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block---
 --Seeks---
 > Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec
 %CPU
 >
 > 2940/PP200
 >           100  3275 56.5  3194 12.8  1424 11.2  4978 80.4  4926 17.8 103.8
  4.1
 >
 > Alpha 1000 4/266 DEC RZ28
 >           100  4906 95.4  5439 17.4  2550 10.4  4746 82.6  5322 12.6 428.0
 10.8
 >
 > GAMESS:
 > Bench           10      04      13      07
 > =============================================
 > IBM370          64      74      366     391
 > P166            61      78      281     335
 > IBM580          59      69      322     381
 >
 > PPro200         43.6    69.3    163.7   254.6 <<<<<<
 >
 > IBM590          33      33      147     202
 > Alpha1000 4/266 23.3    30.5    126.9   147.0
 >
 > The results for the Pentium166 (64M/RAM,FreeBSD2.1.0,2940/NEC2.1HD) and
 > for the PPro200 were obtained with GAMESS (22/nov/95) compiled with
 > GNU Fortran 0.5.18 (slightly faster than f2c/gcc).
 >
 > I need to benchmark gaussian yet to have a more representative sampling
 > but as you can see these are very good results for a cheap computer.
 > If you opt to buy 2 PPro to run GAMESS in parallel you'll got near
 > two times the above reported performance.
 >
 > Pedro
 >-- End of excerpt from Pedro A M Vazquez
 On Jul 17,  3:57pm, Thomas Huber wrote:
 > > > > Model: Plastocyanin all atom force-field with 3375 water
 molecules
 > > > >        periodic boundary conditions, with a residue based
 cutoff (1.2
 nm)
 > > > >        resulting in an about 6,000,000 sized pairlist
 > > > >        100 steps MD
 > > > >
 > > > > Machine					Wallclock time [s]
 > > > >
 > > > > Pentium 90MHz
 > > > > Plato board	linux / f2c&gcc			2791
 > > > > 		linux / g77			3235
 > > > >
 > > > > PentiumPro  150MHz
 > > > > WinNT / Microsoft Fortran PowerStation 4.0	601
 > > > >
 > > > > HP 735 125MHz					539
 > > > >
 > > > > SGI R8000 75MHz					335
 > > > >
 > > > > Dec alpha 600 266MHz				378
 > > > >
 > > > > Cray C90					117
 > > > >
 > > > > Not too bad!!!!!
 > > > >
 > > > > Thomas
 >-- End of excerpt from Thomas Huber
 On Jul 17,  9:41am, Joe Durant wrote:
 > Subject: Re: CCL:G:performance of PPro
 > Hallo Rockus!
 >
 > We have been migrating to Pentiums and Pentium Pros... I put together
 > a web-page with some of our benchmarks, look at
 > http://mephisto.ca.sandia.gov/benchmarks.html
 > I am really happy with my dual P6 box... each processor is roughly the
 > speed of my R8000, and the whole thing costs about $6K.  The dual P6
 > boards offer 4 way interleaving on the memory, which I believe
 > explains the speedup of the dual board over the single processor
 > board.  The loss in performance for things like QCISD is due, I am
 > told, to the gcc compilers not yet being as good at optimizing matrix
 > calculations.  These same people expect the differences to disappear
 > as the gnu compilers for the P6 mature.
 >
 > I look forward to your summary.
 >
 > Joe
 >-- End of excerpt from Joe Durant
 ************************************************************************
 Best greetings to all of you,
 Rochus
 --
 ********************************************************************************
 Rochus Schmid
 Technische Universitaet Muenchen	Tel. 	++49 89 2891 3140
 Lehrstuhl f. Anorganische Chemie 1	Fax. 	++49 89 2891 3088
 Prof. W. A. Herrmann			E-mail:
 Lichtenbergstrasse 4			rochus (- at -) felix.anorg.chemie.tu-muenchen.de
 85747 Garching
 ********************************************************************************