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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-users/attachments/20111024/77ce73c6/attachment.htm>
