AMBER Archive (2001)

Subject: ?s: Xeon vs. Athlon, latency

From: R. M. Fesinmeyer (rmf_at_u.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 03 2001 - 22:36:38 CDT

Hello -- I have two questions I'm hoping can be answered:

1) Are any benchmarks numbers available for dual Athlon and dual (P4) Xeon
systems?

2) Network latency usually comes up whenever a conversation about PC-based
clusters start. In a previous conversation
(http://structbio.vanderbilt.edu/hypermail/amber-archive/1349.phtml) 100Mb/s
ethernet was frowned upon because of its high latency when using a switch.
My understanding is that standard hubs can have lower latency than the
average store-and-forward switch. For a 2-4 node (dual cpu) cluster, might
a hub provide better performance scaling?

With a very small cluster (2-4 nodes), it might even be better to do away
with the hub/switch entirely and connect each pair of systems with an
ethernet crossover cable (obviously this scales depending on your number of
PCI slots). Naturally this requires delving into some relatively-fancy
network set-up, but for the cost of 10Mb/s cards (I doubt amber could
saturate that connection between two nodes), it would seem like a very
inexpensive way of getting very-fast/low-latency interconnects. Is such a
possibility even worth considering?

Thanks for your input

Robert Fesinmeyer