# Presentation: 683356

## BNL / CASPUR / CERNPrice/Performance estimates for some compute platforms (AMD, Intel) 

**Pavel Nevski**
**BNL /CERN**
**October 2004**

## Participated: 

**BNL****	****	****  ****	****:  P.Nevski****	**
**CASPUR****	****	****:  A.Maslennikov****(*)****, M.Rosati         **
**CERN****  ****	****	****:  E.McIntosh, I.McLaren          **
**         **
**(*)**** Project Coordinator**

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## Goals

**We have tried to compare the two most interesting platforms of the day: ****Intel Nocona ****and**** AMD Opteron**
**In short, we wanted  to check which of the two may**
**deliver more compute power per dollar. **

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## Hardware under test (CASPUR)

**  ****Intel Nocona****	****:  ****2 CPUs at  3.4 GHz, 1GB RAM**
**                                            ****RedHat Enterprise 3**
**                                            ****Kernel: 2.4.21+**
**                                            ****Estimated price (*): 3200 Euro **
**                                            ****(1 GB RAM, incl. IPMI card, rack-mounted)**
**     **
**  ****AMD Opteron****	****:  ****2 CPUs at  2 GHz, 1GB RAM**
**                                            ****SuSE Enterprise Edition 9.0**
**                                            ****Kernel: 2.6.5-7+**
**                                            ****SuSE numactl**
**                                            ****Estimated price (*): 3200 Euro **
**                                           ****(1 GB RAM, incl. IPMI function, rack-mounted)****   **
**  ****(*)**** Prices as calculated by E4 Computer Engineering, Italy**

**Hardware under test (CASPUR)**

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## Benchmark suites

**  ****ATLSIM****	****:  ****A full-scale GEANT3 simulation of ATLAS detector (P.Nevski)**
**                            ****(typical LHC Higgs events)**
**   **
**  ****SixTrack****	****: ****Tracking of two particles in a 6-dimensional phase space**
**                           ****including synchrotron oscillations (F.Schmidt)**
**                           ****(**_[http://frs.home.cern.ch/frs/sixtrack.html](http://frs.home.cern.ch/frs/sixtrack.html)_**)**
** **
**                           ****Sixtrack benchmark code: E.McIntosh**
**                           ****(**_[http://frs.home.cern.ch/frs/Benchmark/benchmark.html](http://frs.home.cern.ch/frs/Benchmark/benchmark.html)_**) **
**   ****CERN U****	****:  ****Ancient “CERN Units” Benchmark (E.McIntosh)**

**Benchmark suites**

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## What was measured

**On both platforms, we were running one or two simultaneous jobs for each of the benchmarks.**
** **
**On Opteron, we used the SuSE “numactl” interface**
**to make sure that at any time each of the two processors makes use of the right bank of memory.**
**Example of submission, 2 simultaneous jobs:**
**Intel:****  ****	****./TestJob; ./TestJob**** **
**AMD:****	****numactl –cpubind=0 –membind=0 ./TestJob;**
**            ****	****numactl –cpubind=1 –membind=1 ./TestJob**
**           **

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## Results

| 
 | CERN Units |  | SixTrack 
(seconds/run) |  | ATLSIM
(seconds/event) |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|  | 1 job | 2 jobs | 1 job | 2 jobs | 1 job | 2 jobs |
| Intel Nocona | 491 | 375,399 | 
185 | 
218,218 | 

394 | 

484,484 |
| AMD Opteron | 528 | 528,528 | 
165 | 
165,166 | 

389 | 

389,389 |

**	**
**While both machines behave in a similar way when only one job is run, **
**the situation changes in a visible manner in the case of two jobs. It may take**
**up to 30% more time to run two simultaneous jobs on Intel****, while on AMD**
**there is a notable absence of any visible performance drop. **

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL

## Conclusions

**The results we have obtained were predictable. **
**The Intel platform is a plain SMP architecture, and we are observing an apparent contention effect on the memory bus and/or their single memory controller, when running two simultaneous tasks.**
**The new AMD platform implements a scalable NUMA architecture and**
**allows for independent and hence  non-interfering CPU-to-memory data exchanges over a pair of memory controllers and Hypertransport buses.  **
**As both machines under test cost practically the same, we conclude **
**that going Opteron today may save us up to 30% for the same amount**
**of Teraflops.****     **

**Conclusions**

- P.Nevski - Oct. 2004 - BNL