Hi,

Good to find you! I want to buy a new system for HPC research.

I already use a 4x(AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6174) system running Linux. I use it for running computational intensive simulations in a shared-memory (OpenMP) manner.

I need to buy a new dedicated machine and I was thinking about a 4x12-core or 4*16-core based on the new 6200 opteron cpus. But, I see a big argue on the internet about the FPU of this platform. (look here in the comments)

I quote one of the most disturbing: "For non-FPU-heavy workloads, you can get away with that. For pretty much the entire scientific/math/engineering (SME) community; it's an 8-core processor or a highly crippled 16-core processor." by alpha754293

I do mostly FP calculations since I'm into engineering. I program in Fortran-2003 and I make extensive use of BLAS and LAPACK libraries in Double Precision. Moving to this platform will cripple the cores? In general, how do the 6100 series compare towards the 6200 series in FP computation?

Thanks in advance,
Petros

The issue is, at least in any of the Windows OS's, the scheduler does not farm the jobs out properly and the end result is slower performance. Since the FPU is shared between two clusters it causes a lot of problems with the current drivers (shared scheduler support). You can choose to disable a single cluster per module and performance is vastly improved. I'm not sure if the issue is as bad in Linux though, I heard that AMD and Linux developers were actively working to improve the scheduler performance but that is not to say that Microsoft is doing the same.

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The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

Hi,

First of all thanks for the fast answer! The machine will be running Linux.

I think I got my answer! These two threads are really useful:

http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/...ic.php?f=532&t=138525
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/10/25/the-new-flex-fp/

Thanks for the time! I'm going for the 6200 series btw

Dear Friends,
I hope you do well. I want to buy a cpu (or cpus) to cover my work best. my work is related to computation (Finite Element Analysis by ANSYS Software).
I have a budget about $700. at first, what kind (Phenom, Opteron,...) of AMD do you recommend? recently, ASUS presented a MB that supports dual processors. do you recommend me to buy two cpus (each price of them about $350) or buy one cpu? after that, with considering my budget, what chipset you recommed?
Tnx in advance,
Hajsadeghi,