Choosing the Right Intel Platform for Your HPC Workload

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Nishanth Dandapanthula

Nishanth Dandapanthula

Over at the Dell HPC Blog, Nishanth Dandapanthula writes that choosing the right Intel Ivy Bridge platform depends on your workload.

Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 v2 product family processors (architecture code named Ivy Bridge) have been available in the server market for a few months now. Ivy Bridge processor-based systems provide better performance when compared to previous generation processor families such as Sandy Bridge (Xeon E5-2600) and Westmere (Xeon X5600). This can be attributed to several factors, such as increased core counts because of the 22nm process technology, higher clock rates, increased system memory speeds and larger last level cache. This performance improvement is shown in several studies mentioned in 1, 2 and 3. So, once the decision to move to a new platform or new processor technology has been made, what next? How should these new systems be configured? There are so many choices for the processor itself – different options with different core counts, processor frequency, TDP and, of course, price. Which processor model is optimal for a specific workload? This blog provides quantitative data and analysis to help answer this question by comparing the performance and power profile of different processor models across a variety of HPC applications.

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