[gmx-users] pentium III vs Pentium IVs

[David van der Spoel]

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Erik Lindahl wrote:

>The only reason to go with Pentium4 is if you need double-precision in 
>your MD calculations.
Or if you do something else, besides MD, that uses a lot of double 
precision floating point. Benchmarks of Gaussian (quantum chemistry) show 
that the fastest P4 is quite a bit faster than the fastest Athlon.

>We've just been researching systems to update our local cluster in the 
>group here at Stanford; per processor it can actually be cheaper to go 
>with single-cpu systems, but I would still recommend dual-cpu boxes if 
>you want to run in parallel since the scaling is much better withing 
>each node (no ethernet communication involved).
>
>Dual Pentium4 ("Xeon") boxes are insanely expensive, but the Athlon MP 
>systems are reasonable!
Again, I don't agree completely... Dual Xeons are more expensive, but not 
much more, maybe 30% (but also faster for MD as well as for Gaussian). 
There are now motherboards that use DDR memory which is slightly cheaper 
than RDRAM.

Groeten, David.
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. David van der Spoel, 	Biomedical center, Dept. of Biochemistry
Husargatan 3, Box 576,  	75123 Uppsala, Sweden
phone:	46 18 471 4205		fax: 46 18 511 755
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