I have a Titan Black, Titan X (Maxwell) and a new Titan X (Pascal) in a system for a quick CUDA performance test. Install is on Ubuntu 16.04 with CUDA 8.0rc. We’ll look at nbody from the CUDA samples code and NAMD Molecular Dynamics. It is stunning to see how much the CUDA performance has increased on these wonderful GPU’s in just 3 years.
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.
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.
Just got a NVIDIA GTX 1080 for testing. I hacked up an install with Ubuntu 16.04 and CUDA 7.5 along with a beta display driver that works! First run after compiling the cuda samples nbody gave 5816 GFLOP/s! A GTX 980 on the same system does 2572 GFLOP/s. However, it’s not all good news …
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.
You can try Intel Python from your Anaconda install using conda!
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.
I was preparing a Puget Systems Traverse Skylake based laptop for GPU accelerated molecular dynamics demos at the upcoming ACS meeting and decided to see if I could get Ubuntu 16.04 beta working with NVIDIA CUDA 7.5. It worked!
Intel is working on an optimized Python! I did a quick test with the preview version and it looks good.
Can you use an Intel Xeon Phi with Windows 10? Yes, you can. However, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it! I did a set up and a little testing mainly just to see if it would work — it does!
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