[CentOS] Motherboards for HPC applications

On Thursday, March 11, 2010 01:41 AM, Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Christopher Chan
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>  wrote:
>
>> On the Intel side, a dual socket solution
>> will even outperform a quad socket solution so if one is looking for
>> Intel cpu solutions, dual socket is the only sensible choice. But that
>
> Wow, that's a pretty impressive statement, can you elaborate on that?

Intel does not have a NUMA architecture solution for quad socket boards 
yet and so bus contention kills scaling on quad socket Intel solutions. 
Right now, AMD owns the quad socket market when it comes to performance.


> You mean, for every possible workload? Is it something you learned
> from direct experience, or have you read about it? If so, where? If
> from experience, what was the general setup, applications, etc?

Anandtech did some testing last quarter where they compared what appears 
to be the best quad socket Intel solution against the best dual socket 
Intel solution and the dual socket solution ran circles around the quad 
in some tests and pretty much matches it in other tests.

http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3653&p=1

According to the article, Intel will be coming out with something that 
will scale at the quad socket level some time this year so things are 
probably going to change on this front.