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Computer Construction Conundrum

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  • N NormDroid

    Nicholas Butler wrote:

    What would you do with 48 cores?

    Start a Data Center :)

    Two heads are better than one.

    N Offline
    N Offline
    Nicholas Butler
    wrote on last edited by
    #5

    Not a million miles off my next ( possible ) contract! Nick

    1 Reply Last reply
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    • P Pete OHanlon

      Nicholas Butler wrote:

      What would you do with 48 cores?

      Expression Blend would fly. Outlook would still hang.

      I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be

      Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

      My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

      N Offline
      N Offline
      Nicholas Butler
      wrote on last edited by
      #6

      Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

      Expression Blend would fly.

      I didn't know that Blend was multi-threaded :cool: Shame that concurrency was dropped from WPF :sigh: Nick

      P 1 Reply Last reply
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      • N Nicholas Butler

        Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

        Expression Blend would fly.

        I didn't know that Blend was multi-threaded :cool: Shame that concurrency was dropped from WPF :sigh: Nick

        P Offline
        P Offline
        Pete OHanlon
        wrote on last edited by
        #7

        Nicholas Butler wrote:

        Shame that concurrency was dropped from WPF

        Only the UI - it's still constrained by the same issues for running STA as hampered WinForms.

        Nicholas Butler wrote:

        I didn't know that Blend was multi-threaded

        Yup.

        I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be

        Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

        My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

        N S 2 Replies Last reply
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        • P Pete OHanlon

          Nicholas Butler wrote:

          Shame that concurrency was dropped from WPF

          Only the UI - it's still constrained by the same issues for running STA as hampered WinForms.

          Nicholas Butler wrote:

          I didn't know that Blend was multi-threaded

          Yup.

          I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be

          Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

          My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

          N Offline
          N Offline
          Nicholas Butler
          wrote on last edited by
          #8

          Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

          Only the UI - it's still constrained by the same issues for running STA as hampered WinForms.

          I heard that it was mostly implemented but dropped because it was too complicated for developers. A real missed opportunity if true :sigh: Nick

          1 Reply Last reply
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          • D Distind

            Play Civilization 5 on the largest map settings possible on the maximum allowed turn count. Or so I'd guess, I'm still 25 hours off from getting my copy.

            N Offline
            N Offline
            Nicholas Butler
            wrote on last edited by
            #9

            Distind wrote:

            I'm still 25 hours off from getting my copy.

            I suggest getting some sleep now then :) Nick

            1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • N Nicholas Butler

              So, it's time to replace my main dev box. Request for advice &| experience please :) I built my current box for £1200 2.5 years ago. It's a dual quad-core Xeon and I've learnt just about all I can from it. It's been the best £1 per day I've ever spent, but hey! nothing lasts forever... So I've looked around a bit and AMD have released a new range "Magny-Cours" of 8-core and 12-core Opterons at sensible prices. They are basically two quad- or hex-core CPUs in one package for half the price. They have are NUMA ( albeit cache coherent ) as each half of each socket has it's own memory channel. And they all support 2-socket and 4-socket configurations. Very interesting! I'm sorely tempted to build a 48-core box just for fun, but I'm having difficulty convincing myself as my last client still only had up to 8-core boxes. On the other hand, I think that will change soon, and certainly over the next 2.5 years. BTW, I would be using this for writing concurrent business server software. What would you do with 48 cores? Cheers, Nick

              E Offline
              E Offline
              Electron Shepherd
              wrote on last edited by
              #10

              Nicholas Butler wrote:

              £1200

              Nicholas Butler wrote:

              2.5 years ago

              Nicholas Butler wrote:

              £1 per day

              Nicholas Butler wrote:

              What would you do with 48 cores?

              Accurate division? :laugh: ;P

              Server and Network Monitoring

              L 1 Reply Last reply
              0
              • N Nicholas Butler

                So, it's time to replace my main dev box. Request for advice &| experience please :) I built my current box for £1200 2.5 years ago. It's a dual quad-core Xeon and I've learnt just about all I can from it. It's been the best £1 per day I've ever spent, but hey! nothing lasts forever... So I've looked around a bit and AMD have released a new range "Magny-Cours" of 8-core and 12-core Opterons at sensible prices. They are basically two quad- or hex-core CPUs in one package for half the price. They have are NUMA ( albeit cache coherent ) as each half of each socket has it's own memory channel. And they all support 2-socket and 4-socket configurations. Very interesting! I'm sorely tempted to build a 48-core box just for fun, but I'm having difficulty convincing myself as my last client still only had up to 8-core boxes. On the other hand, I think that will change soon, and certainly over the next 2.5 years. BTW, I would be using this for writing concurrent business server software. What would you do with 48 cores? Cheers, Nick

                D Offline
                D Offline
                Dave Parker
                wrote on last edited by
                #11

                Nicholas Butler wrote:

                What would you do with 48 cores?

                Nothing, doubt I'd notice any difference. I rarely use 5% of one core. It's the gfx card that's the limiting factor in games and disk I/O with everything else. Other than a lot of disk thrashing at times in vmware though I don't really have any performance issues. Guess it'd be good for things like folding at home, SETI, etc, but then again the system will probably consume more electricity under load as well.

                N 1 Reply Last reply
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                • E Electron Shepherd

                  Nicholas Butler wrote:

                  £1200

                  Nicholas Butler wrote:

                  2.5 years ago

                  Nicholas Butler wrote:

                  £1 per day

                  Nicholas Butler wrote:

                  What would you do with 48 cores?

                  Accurate division? :laugh: ;P

                  Server and Network Monitoring

                  L Offline
                  L Offline
                  Luc Pattyn
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #12

                  It seems pretty accurate, as Nick plans another 10 months for deciding, purchasing and assembling. One can't create a 48-headed monster overnight! :)

                  Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum

                  Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.

                  1 Reply Last reply
                  0
                  • N Nicholas Butler

                    So, it's time to replace my main dev box. Request for advice &| experience please :) I built my current box for £1200 2.5 years ago. It's a dual quad-core Xeon and I've learnt just about all I can from it. It's been the best £1 per day I've ever spent, but hey! nothing lasts forever... So I've looked around a bit and AMD have released a new range "Magny-Cours" of 8-core and 12-core Opterons at sensible prices. They are basically two quad- or hex-core CPUs in one package for half the price. They have are NUMA ( albeit cache coherent ) as each half of each socket has it's own memory channel. And they all support 2-socket and 4-socket configurations. Very interesting! I'm sorely tempted to build a 48-core box just for fun, but I'm having difficulty convincing myself as my last client still only had up to 8-core boxes. On the other hand, I think that will change soon, and certainly over the next 2.5 years. BTW, I would be using this for writing concurrent business server software. What would you do with 48 cores? Cheers, Nick

                    D Offline
                    D Offline
                    Dan Neely
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #13

                    Have the fastest computer on einstien@home. (unless someone else has a 4way Nehelem running, E@H runs significantly faster on Intel atm).

                    3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                    N 1 Reply Last reply
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                    • D Dave Parker

                      Nicholas Butler wrote:

                      What would you do with 48 cores?

                      Nothing, doubt I'd notice any difference. I rarely use 5% of one core. It's the gfx card that's the limiting factor in games and disk I/O with everything else. Other than a lot of disk thrashing at times in vmware though I don't really have any performance issues. Guess it'd be good for things like folding at home, SETI, etc, but then again the system will probably consume more electricity under load as well.

                      N Offline
                      N Offline
                      Nicholas Butler
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #14

                      I agree that outside specialist niches ( science, banking, ... ) there is still no real requirement for today's processors on client machines. But I am seeing real usage on servers with even just tens of concurrent requests. Especially where reads are more common than writes and are serviced from main memory.

                      Dave Parker wrote:

                      folding at home

                      I was expecting Elaine to jump in with that :) Nick

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • D Dan Neely

                        Have the fastest computer on einstien@home. (unless someone else has a 4way Nehelem running, E@H runs significantly faster on Intel atm).

                        3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                        N Offline
                        N Offline
                        Nicholas Butler
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #15

                        Hi Dan, Actually, this[^] is what's not influencing my decision at all :-D Nick

                        D 1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • N Nicholas Butler

                          Hi Dan, Actually, this[^] is what's not influencing my decision at all :-D Nick

                          D Offline
                          D Offline
                          Dan Neely
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #16

                          *nod* I'm not quite sure what to be looking at there since intel/amd use different numbering schemes for their multi-socket chips than the single socket ones, but for my biggest use intel's cleaning amd's clock. As of late spring this year a ~$1000 s1366 system (to match my existing 1366 for troubleshooting ease) performed roughly on par with 2x$500 amd quad core systems. I know the general performance comparison is less lopsided although I'm not sure what's driving it. E@H is compiled using GCC and at least one of the two apps has hand optimized hot loops written by the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary before the project hired him as a consultant to improve their stock apps.

                          3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                          N 1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • P Pete OHanlon

                            Nicholas Butler wrote:

                            Shame that concurrency was dropped from WPF

                            Only the UI - it's still constrained by the same issues for running STA as hampered WinForms.

                            Nicholas Butler wrote:

                            I didn't know that Blend was multi-threaded

                            Yup.

                            I have CDO, it's OCD with the letters in the right order; just as they ruddy well should be

                            Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

                            My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

                            S Offline
                            S Offline
                            Single Step Debugger
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #17

                            Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

                            Only the UI - it's still constrained by the same issues for running STA as hampered WinForms.

                            This is not such a problem, the reflection is a good work around this restriction.

                            The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

                            1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • N Nicholas Butler

                              So, it's time to replace my main dev box. Request for advice &| experience please :) I built my current box for £1200 2.5 years ago. It's a dual quad-core Xeon and I've learnt just about all I can from it. It's been the best £1 per day I've ever spent, but hey! nothing lasts forever... So I've looked around a bit and AMD have released a new range "Magny-Cours" of 8-core and 12-core Opterons at sensible prices. They are basically two quad- or hex-core CPUs in one package for half the price. They have are NUMA ( albeit cache coherent ) as each half of each socket has it's own memory channel. And they all support 2-socket and 4-socket configurations. Very interesting! I'm sorely tempted to build a 48-core box just for fun, but I'm having difficulty convincing myself as my last client still only had up to 8-core boxes. On the other hand, I think that will change soon, and certainly over the next 2.5 years. BTW, I would be using this for writing concurrent business server software. What would you do with 48 cores? Cheers, Nick

                              C Offline
                              C Offline
                              Chris Losinger
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #18

                              Nicholas Butler wrote:

                              What would you do with 48 cores?

                              i'd wonder what was going to become of those two bags of apples.

                              image processing toolkits | batch image processing

                              L E 2 Replies Last reply
                              0
                              • N Nicholas Butler

                                So, it's time to replace my main dev box. Request for advice &| experience please :) I built my current box for £1200 2.5 years ago. It's a dual quad-core Xeon and I've learnt just about all I can from it. It's been the best £1 per day I've ever spent, but hey! nothing lasts forever... So I've looked around a bit and AMD have released a new range "Magny-Cours" of 8-core and 12-core Opterons at sensible prices. They are basically two quad- or hex-core CPUs in one package for half the price. They have are NUMA ( albeit cache coherent ) as each half of each socket has it's own memory channel. And they all support 2-socket and 4-socket configurations. Very interesting! I'm sorely tempted to build a 48-core box just for fun, but I'm having difficulty convincing myself as my last client still only had up to 8-core boxes. On the other hand, I think that will change soon, and certainly over the next 2.5 years. BTW, I would be using this for writing concurrent business server software. What would you do with 48 cores? Cheers, Nick

                                R Offline
                                R Offline
                                realJSOP
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #19

                                I don't understand why you feel the need to build a new machine. Compiler tech certainly is just barely using what you have now. My current quad-core box is 3-4 years old, and I feel no need to upgrade the hardware.

                                .45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
                                -----
                                "Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
                                -----
                                "The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001

                                D 1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • D Dan Neely

                                  *nod* I'm not quite sure what to be looking at there since intel/amd use different numbering schemes for their multi-socket chips than the single socket ones, but for my biggest use intel's cleaning amd's clock. As of late spring this year a ~$1000 s1366 system (to match my existing 1366 for troubleshooting ease) performed roughly on par with 2x$500 amd quad core systems. I know the general performance comparison is less lopsided although I'm not sure what's driving it. E@H is compiled using GCC and at least one of the two apps has hand optimized hot loops written by the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary before the project hired him as a consultant to improve their stock apps.

                                  3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                                  N Offline
                                  N Offline
                                  Nicholas Butler
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #20

                                  I'm in a niche ( ATM ) market, as I work from home writing concurrent software. The equivalent Intel chips are the 7500 Beckton series. These have 8 cores and 16 threads which according to reports beat the 12-core AMD 6100s. However, I can't find any in stock and the retail prices that are published are prohibitive.

                                  Dan Neely wrote:

                                  the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary

                                  Impressive :omg: Nick

                                  D 1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • C Chris Losinger

                                    Nicholas Butler wrote:

                                    What would you do with 48 cores?

                                    i'd wonder what was going to become of those two bags of apples.

                                    image processing toolkits | batch image processing

                                    L Offline
                                    L Offline
                                    Lost User
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #21

                                    Apparently that went over someone's head. :rolleyes: (5)

                                    L u n a t i c F r i n g e

                                    C 1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • N Nicholas Butler

                                      I'm in a niche ( ATM ) market, as I work from home writing concurrent software. The equivalent Intel chips are the 7500 Beckton series. These have 8 cores and 16 threads which according to reports beat the 12-core AMD 6100s. However, I can't find any in stock and the retail prices that are published are prohibitive.

                                      Dan Neely wrote:

                                      the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary

                                      Impressive :omg: Nick

                                      D Offline
                                      D Offline
                                      Dan Neely
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #22

                                      Nicholas Butler wrote:

                                      Dan Neely wrote: the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary Impressive OMG

                                      Yeah. It was really nice for a while since we were getting 9x as many points/day which helped a lot in the bragging rights contest. IIRC he got about ~4-5x from algorithmic changes that were incorporated in the next official app (moving stuff into lookup tables and tweaking working sets to fit inside L1 caches) and ~2x from writing better hot loops to eliminate pipeline stalls and incorporating SSE/SSE2 instructions. The original was pure x87, his replacements interleaved both x87 and SSE instructions to keep both of their pipelines fully loaded. It was eye opening after years of reading that a good compiler is almost impossible to beat these days. Granted that a good C/C++ programmer could have done most of the improvements in his code and used compiler options to get basic SSE1/2 versions, but IIRC we've had 30-50% speedups in new apps after they were regarded as stable enough to start mucking around with asm. Overkill for most uses probably, but at supercomputer work loads even a few percent can help; especially when the total problem set is large enough that probabilistic algorithms are needed to prune the data massively early on. Even with those at present signals need to be an order of magnitude larger than the sensors thresholds to be detected (below that the odds decline roughly linearly), the previous algorithm's sure detection threshold was +2 magnitudes. This is a major challenge when the strongest signal expected from a known pulsar is right at the theoretician detection threshold and is near a massive noise spike.

                                      3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                                      C 1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • R realJSOP

                                        I don't understand why you feel the need to build a new machine. Compiler tech certainly is just barely using what you have now. My current quad-core box is 3-4 years old, and I feel no need to upgrade the hardware.

                                        .45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
                                        -----
                                        "Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
                                        -----
                                        "The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001

                                        D Offline
                                        D Offline
                                        Dan Neely
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #23

                                        From comments made elsewhere I don't think is using all zillion cores to compile on, he's writing apps that scale across a zillion cores.

                                        3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                                        E 1 Reply Last reply
                                        0
                                        • D Dan Neely

                                          Nicholas Butler wrote:

                                          Dan Neely wrote: the guy who ~4 years ago got a 9x speedup vs the stock app by hacking the binary Impressive OMG

                                          Yeah. It was really nice for a while since we were getting 9x as many points/day which helped a lot in the bragging rights contest. IIRC he got about ~4-5x from algorithmic changes that were incorporated in the next official app (moving stuff into lookup tables and tweaking working sets to fit inside L1 caches) and ~2x from writing better hot loops to eliminate pipeline stalls and incorporating SSE/SSE2 instructions. The original was pure x87, his replacements interleaved both x87 and SSE instructions to keep both of their pipelines fully loaded. It was eye opening after years of reading that a good compiler is almost impossible to beat these days. Granted that a good C/C++ programmer could have done most of the improvements in his code and used compiler options to get basic SSE1/2 versions, but IIRC we've had 30-50% speedups in new apps after they were regarded as stable enough to start mucking around with asm. Overkill for most uses probably, but at supercomputer work loads even a few percent can help; especially when the total problem set is large enough that probabilistic algorithms are needed to prune the data massively early on. Even with those at present signals need to be an order of magnitude larger than the sensors thresholds to be detected (below that the odds decline roughly linearly), the previous algorithm's sure detection threshold was +2 magnitudes. This is a major challenge when the strongest signal expected from a known pulsar is right at the theoretician detection threshold and is near a massive noise spike.

                                          3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

                                          C Offline
                                          C Offline
                                          Chris Losinger
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #24

                                          Dan Neely wrote:

                                          It was eye opening after years of reading that a good compiler is almost impossible to beat these days

                                          yup. i beat it almost every time i try, and i'm a complete ASM novice. and the 'intrinsics' are nearly more trouble than they're worth. i was struggling this weekend to come up with x64 equivalents to some old _asm {... MMX stuff...} blocks in our code, so i tried the intrinsics. but they ended up being like 4x slower than my hand-written ASM because things were constantly being shoved in and out of the MMX registers instead of being held registers for reuse.

                                          image processing toolkits | batch image processing

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