The best HPC bang for your buck

This free posting slices and dices the performance of the Intel Nehalem processor in an HPC setting. The main point is that you can set up the right architecture to get the most value out of multi-core processors.

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"A lot has been written in the HPC field about how it doesn’t matter how many cores you have in a processor if you can’t keep them busy. Well, I will pile on with my own proof point and opinion. One of the key factors to keeping the processor cores busy is how fast you can move data in and out of cores. In some cases, customers maximize total application performance by optimizing around performance per core. This also often results in extracting the best performance return on your application licensing costs (if you happen to be licensing your application on a per core, process, or software token basis). The performance per core optimization occurs by turning some cores in the processor and thus allowing the remaining active cores more memory bandwidth-- spreading your workload among more processor sockets or servers while keeping the number of cores constant. So why would you turn off cores in one of the best processor in the market today?

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