hi Rayson, Most interesting stuff.
The question i ask myself. Why is it so expensive? If i do a silly compare, just looking to the Ghz. Then a quad core 1.4Ghz is similar to a single core i7 @ 1.5Ghz roughly for Diep. I rounded up optimistically the IPC of diep at a single ARM core to 0.5 (if you realize a bulldozer core gets like 0.73, you'll realize the problem of this optimistic guess, whereas an i7 core is over 1.73+ ). Diep being in principle a 32 bits integer program, just 64 bits compiled for a bigger caching range (hashtable) of course profits perfectly from ARM. You won't find much software that can run better on such ARM cpu's than a chessprogram. So 1600 nodes then is like 800 cores 3Ghz i7. Or a 100 socket machine i7 @ 8 cores a CPU, or a 128 socket machine i7 @ 6 cores a CPU. The 6 core Xeons actually are a tad higher clocked than 3Ghz, but let's forget about that now. Now getting that with a good network might not be so cheap, but so to speak there is a budget of far over 1.2 million / 128 = $9375 per socket. So that 's a 64 node switch and 64 nodes dual socket Xeon. That gives a budget of $18750 a node. Pretty easy to build i'd say so. Now performance a watt. Of course something ARM is good at. With 64 nodes that means 9900 watt / 64 = 154 watt per node. We can be sure that the Xeon burn more than that. Yet it's not much more than factor 2 off and everywhere so far i rounded off optimistically for the ARM. I took 3Ghz cpu's, in reality they're higher clocked. I took 6 cores, in reality they're soon 8 cores a node. I took an IPC of 0.5 for the arm cores, and we must still see they will get that IPC, most likely they won't. So it's nearly on par if we do a real accurate calculation. It's not like there is much of a margin in power consumption versus optimized i7 code. This factor 2 evaporates practical. Who would anyone be interested in buying this at this huge price with as far as i can see 0 advantages. On Nov 8, 2011, at 10:03 PM, Rayson Ho wrote: > ARM is an interesting platform that offers better performance/power > ratio than x64 processors. I don't think ARM will eat into HPC shares > of AMD/Intel/IBM POWER or enter the TOP500 list any time soon. > However, I am expecting to see ARM in high throughput environments in > the near future. Thus, we are announcing that the next version of Grid > Engine released by the Grid Scheduler open project will support ARM > Linux. > > We tested SGE on an ARMv7 box. As the SGE code is 64-bit clean, when > 64-bit ARM processors come out in the next year or two, our version > should/will compile & work out of the box. > > Rayson > > ================================= > Grid Engine / Open Grid Scheduler > http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net > > > > On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 10:10 PM, Bill Broadley > <[email protected]> wrote: >> The best summary I've found: >> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/ >> >> Specifications at for the ECX-1000: >> http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000/techspecs >> >> And EnergyCard: >> http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycards/techspecs >> >> The only hint on price that I found was from theregister.co.uk: >> The sales pitch for the Redstone systems, says Santeler, is that a >> half rack of Redstone machines and their external switches >> implementing 1,600 server nodes has 41 cables, burns 9.9 kilowatts, >> and costs $1.2m. >> >> So it sounds like for 6 watts and $750 you get a quad core 1.4 GHz >> arm >> 10G connected node. >> >> Comments? >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin >> Computing >> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit >> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >> > > > > -- > Rayson > > ================================================== > Open Grid Scheduler - The Official Open Source Grid Engine > http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/ > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin > Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
