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Re: box for testing



On Wed, 2011-10-05 at 22:42 +0200, Andrew Holway wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We are just in the process of buying a lot of the new AMD interlargo
> boxes and I think my bosses are quite sold on the idea of providing
> one to the Debian project for testing. We use Debian extensively and
> are seeing that HPC performance, specifically floating point, is not
> so great on the newer equipment.

In this chip, each pair of cores shares FPU resources.  Whenever a core
executes a 256-bit floating-point vector operation, it has to borrow
resources from its neighbour.  I'm no expert, but I would think they
aren't the best choice for HPC.

> Compared to the last step (magnycours) floating point performance is
> roughly half on the new processors.
> 
> Do you think access to a new box would improve this?

While we could probably make good use of a new fast machine, I doubt
that we could use them to improve floating point performance.  That
would normally be done by upstream developers working on compilers and
numerical libraries.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

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