<Paul: AThlon clusters? If these are indeed available, they are clusters of single CPU nodes.>
Of course they would be single CPU nodes. We already have a P2 cluster (single cpu nodes, 8 machines). Not exactly state-of-the-art, but... Anyway, we make them [the clusters] ourselves. It's not too hard to do for our kind of code; it's easy to packetize and the latency of each packet isn't TOO relevant. Like I mentioned before, the code has a very high degree of parallelism.
As for porting the software to Itanium, that probably wouldn't be too hard (again, I wouldn't want to do it for a small performance gain). I imagine C compilers would be available and plentiful and much of the code is already ported to a 64bit platform (not It. of course, but we HAD been promised a nice Alpha system, but then the budget cuts hit).
The problem with testing out my/our code on Intel's semi-public It. servers is that it's very dependent on memory and cache and I am not at all convinced that a run on it would be a good indication of actual performance. My understanding of their setup is that you can use it to see if your code will actually run, more than gauge actual performance (but I may be mistaken). We're also not exactly talking the kind of budget size where we could get Intel to grant us any kind of special access ;)
Lastly, I'm not sure what the price target of a complete Itanium/McKinley will be. Is Intel aiming it at 21364 price ranges? Or closer to Xeon price ranges? If we're talking 20k for something that performs little better than a couple of Athlons...
Anyway, I don't have the last say in choice of system, but since I'm the one who'd be porting much of the code, I am able to lobby quite a bit. I hadn't actually considered the Itanium seriously, since I didn't think it was even shipping in "trial" quantities. I also think it might be out of our current price-range. I was just asking you since I basically don't know squat about the It.
The P4, on the other hand, sounds pretty interesting considering the SSE2. However, I'm not sure how fast the dp operations will actually be on it and what the price and reliability will be. I guess I'll have to wait and see... (November 20...)
Thanks,
-fyo |
