Computer Construction Conundrum
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El Corazon wrote:
"wouldn't you love to get your hands on one of those gibsons...."
Actually, there were some 48-core supercomputers in 1995 ;) Thanks for your suggestions, but wouldn't GPU(s) be better for those applications? How would a 48-core computer perform against a couple of the new Tesla C2050 cards, for example? I am more interested in C# LOB apps that use concurrency. Which, as far as I can tell at the moment, is mostly server software. I was hoping that someone was actually using the cores available on client machines. Nick
Nicholas Butler wrote:
Thanks for your suggestions, but wouldn't GPU(s) be better for those applications? How would a 48-core computer perform against a couple of the new Tesla C2050 cards, for example?
True, but much is parallel of parallel systems. Where much of that has to be done at the same time I am currently drifting away from GPU/CPU trying to head now to unified processing power where all of the system can used GPU/CPU and both. Nothing of the system is wasted.
_________________________ John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Shhhhh.... I am not really here. I am a figment of your imagination.... I am still in my cave so this must be an illusion....
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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
Nicholas Butler wrote:
What would you do with 48 cores?
For the ways I use my dev box, I'd just watch it heat the room :) Disk drives are not fast enough to keep up with the I/O needs of a 48-core parallel compile. You might also want to check what the per-core incremental performance benefit is as you get toward that 48th core. Years ago, I saw plots from friends studying the issue where it went negative.
patbob