Threadripper 3990x 64-core Parallel Scaling

64 cores is a lot of cores! How well will parallel applications scale on that many cores? The answer, of course, is, it depends on the application. In this post I look at Amdhal’s Law parallel scaling for HPL Linpack, Python numpy and the NAMD molecular dynamics program.

AMD Threadripper 3990x 64-core Linpack and NAMD Performance (Linux)

64 cores! The latest AMD Threadripper is out, the 3990x 64-core. I’ve spent the last couple of days running benchmarks and have some results showing raw numerical compute performance using my standard CPU testing applications HPL Linpack and the molecular dynamics program NAMD. The 3990x is a great processor with exceptional performance. Especially for NAMD! (There were some difficulties and disappointments during the testing and I report those here too.)

SC19 A look at the high end of HPC

The Super Computing conference annual US counterpart is always a great meeting. It’s a chance to see the trend and get sentiment for the highest performance end of computing. I have written up a few observations and provided a few interesting links for SC19.

AMD 3900X (Brief) Compute Performance Linpack and NAMD

I was able to spend a little time with an AMD Ryzen 3900X. Of course the first thing I wanted know was the double precision floating point performance. My two favorite applications for a “first look” at a new processor are Linpack and NAMD. The Ryzen 3900X is a pretty impressive processor!