HPC Posts

Intel Xeon E5 v4 Broadwell Buyers Guide (Parallel Performance)

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Intel’s Xeon E5 v4 processors are available and there are lots of them! The changes from the v3 Haswell are mostly small clock changes and increases in core count. You can now get a E5-2699v4 with 22 cores. In a dual socket system that’s 44 cores to work with. If the programs you want to run scale well with thread count then that could be a great processor for you. However, if your parallel scaling is not near linear then it may not be the best value. We have a dynamic chart of performance based on Amdahl’s Law that may help you decide which processor is best for your uses.

NAMD Molecular Dynamics Performance on NVIDIA GTX 1080 and 1070 GPU

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The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPU’s are out and I’ve received a lot of questions about NAMD performance. The short answer is — performance is great! I’ve got some numbers to back that up below. We’ve got new Broadwell Xeon and Core-i7 CPU’s thrown into the mix too. The new hardware refresh gives a nice step up in performance.

Intel Broadwell Xeon E5 2600v4 performance test

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The Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 Broadwell processors are finally available. My first Linpack testing with a E5-2687W v4 shows a greater than 35% performance increase over the v3 Haswell version! And, it’s the same price as the v3 version! It’s significantly better than expected.

NVIDIA DIGITS Install

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If you are happy to use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Ubuntu-MATE in our case) then setting up a system with the NVIDIA DIGITS software stack is simple. I’ll give you some guidance on getting everything working, from the Linux install to the DIGITS web interface.

Xeon E5v3 All Core Turbo and Amdahl’s Law

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Intel E5 v3 processors will run at “All Core Turbo” under load if properly cooled. This “clock” measurement is a better predictor of theoretical performance than base clock. We present a table of CPU performance at “all-core-turbo” using different parallel scaling factors from Amdhal’s Law. We have a dynamic graph that will show how much performance you lose when your parallel scaling is less than perfect. Just because your dual socket 16-core system shows all 32 cores at 100% doesn’t mean your problem is running 32 times faster!

What is Machine Learning

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Machine Learning is getting a lot of attention these days and with good reason. There are mountains of data to work with and computing resources to handle the problems are easily attainable. Even a single GPU accelerated workstation is capable of serious work.