Hi Tom! On 22 Jan., 23:49, Tom Boothby <tomas.boot...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Simon King <simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> wrote: > > Actually, for some applications, sage.math isn't the fastest. > > Excellent points! I'm definitely in favor of adding a few larger hard > drives to the machines, because I really hate our current setup with > USB drives cluttering up the rack. With regard to speed... there are > faster processors out there, but this comes at the cost of cores. We > could run 16 cores at 3.4GHz, which I could get behind. We could push > this further, and cut down to 8 cores at 3.7GHz, but I don't think > that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
I was talking about - a Mac Pro desktop machine running at 2.6 Ghz, (I guess this is bsd.math), benchmark 13 CPU min - Intel Core 2 CPU under Linux, running at 2.6 Ghz, benchmark 19 CPU min - I don't know why, but for my programs they are both faster than sage.math, or at least they were: when I last tested (maybe 6 months ago) sage.math needed 27 CPU min. So, by 'diversity' I meant a variety of processor types / architectures. My experience is that this alone can easily make a difference of 50%, *beyond* GHz (notice the above timings, both with 2.6 GHz, the memory consumption did not seem to be critical). I have no idea why my programs work so fast on bsd.math, although they were developped on an AMD processor under Linux. But I guess having many different platforms provides the best chance to find the one platform that is really good for a given program. That' s the point I wanted to make. > > By the way, I am -1 to having just two more identical machines. Why > > not foster some diversity? > > Because the hardware is a *dream* to work with. The design is modular > with captive screws, the rails snap into the rack and slide out > smoothly, the ILOM makes it possible to hard boot / diagnose hardware > from a remote location (we can flash the BIOS from anywhere in the > world!) OK, that's a good point. I have no experience whatsoever in administrating a big machine. Cheers, Simon -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
