From: Gavin McCullagh (gavin at domain fiachra.ucd.ie)
Date: Wed 29 Aug 2001 - 19:55:07 IST
Hi all,
our work on computers as many of you will recall is 95% long time (eg 1month) floating point intensive computations. At present almost all our machines are dual PIIIs and uni athlons. Fair enough, we'd love to get a string of alphas or even itaniums for ourselves, but it's not financially viable right now.
I've noted several other groups with similar workloads buying Xeon based machines. We've not done this as is appeared to us the advatages would be limited and hence the money would not be worth it. Under what circumstances is it recommended to get a Xeon?
If the program and dataset fits in the cache it doesn't take a genius to work out that the program's going to be sped up substantially. However, if this is not the case, is there much gain??
To keep on topic I assume linux's use of a Xeon or a PIII are almost identical, right? We use debian for almost everything now and are very happy with it. I guess there are different compiler optimizations for a Xeon in gcc.
Gavin
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