[gmx-users] Itanium 2

[Erik Lindahl]

Peter Tieleman wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> Has anyone tried running gromacs on Itanium 2 or Power 4 processors? 
> What is their speed, compared to a pentium or athlon of your choice?

Hi Peter,

The HP (former Compaq) testdrive program just added an Itanium 2 
machine. Since we cannot use assembly loops I would guess it is about a 
factor 2 faster than the Itanium 1 on the benchmark page, or roughly the 
speed of a 2-2.5 GHz P4.

The Power4 is 3-4 times faster than the Power3, so it will probably be 
_slightly_ faster, more or less on par with a 2.8 GHz P4.

The actual benchmark might differ 20-30% from these figures, but they 
are still not price competitive with x86...

If you don't have to pay it yourself (supercomputer center :-), I would 
recommend IBM - I really like their compilers, and they might be 
including Altivec in future generations of the Power CPUs (they just 
announced a 64 bit desktop CPU - PPC970, which has Altivec).

Cheers,

Erik