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.)

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!

How to Run an Optimized HPL Linpack Benchmark on AMD Ryzen Threadripper — 2990WX 32-core Performance

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX with 32 cores is an intriguing processor. I’ve been asked about performance for numerical computing and decided to find out how well it would do with my favorite benchmark the “High Performance Linpack” benchmark. This is used to rank Supercomputers on the Top500 list. It is not always simple to run this test since it can require building a few libraries from source. This includes the all important BLAS library which AMD has optimized in their BLIS package. I give you a complete How-To guide for getting this running to see what the 2990WX is capable of.