Re: [gentoo-cluster] Gentoo vs RedHat cluster

[Brady Catherman]

For our Mac OS run I was able to work with Apple to get performance  
numbers up. Mac OS started much, much slower than Linux and failed to  
scale at all. One of the Apple engineers emailed with several  
recommendations to improve performance. The biggest was to not use  
Mpich 1. Once I compiled against Mpich 2 everything went much faster  
on the Apple side of things.

Anyways, the Apple run of HPL was compiled against the Accelerate  
framework while the Gentoo side was compiled against the most recent  
Goto libraries (in January 2006). The Apple side was compiled with a  
custom version of GCC 4.0.2 (XCode doesn't come with fortran) and the  
Linux side was compiled with GCC 4.0.2 from Gentoo's ebuild.

I may have made it harder for myself in that I compiled a 64 bit  
kernel and 64 bit platform.

Our setup is XServe G5's 2.3GHz with 4GB of RAM, running form a local  
80GB SATA hard drive. At the time we just had a simple GigE  
connection between nodes. Not we have a GigE based FNN.

What environment was your partner using?




On Apr 12, 2006, at 8:26 PM, Justin Bronder wrote:

> We've actually noticed the opposite results here with OS X 10.4 vs.
> Linux as far as HPL goes.
> I don't have the numbers on hand, but Linux was notably faster with
> HPL
> over both GigE and
> Myrinet.  In fact the numbers for Colsa (our partner) in the Top500
> were
> achieved using Yellow
> Dog instead of OS X.  That being said if you have a moment I have a
> few
> questions:
>
> 1.)  What libraries were you using?  Did you use Goto's?
> 2.)  Which compiler(s) did you use?
> 3.)  What sort of setup do you have?  Diskless or not and so on.
>
>
> Brady Catherman wrote:
>> Unfortunately BPS has an annoying habit of overwriting the test
>> output
>> files every time it is run regardless of which test you actually run.
>> I didn't notice this when I was doing my initial stuff on RedHat so I
>> lost all the other tests results from BPS. I have better tests of the
>> hardware since then. We ran HPL on the PowerPC cluster running both
>> Gentoo 2005.1 and Mac OS 10.4 (mac os was ~ %5 faster on average). I
>> ran IOZone on our XRaid using HFS+ under Mac OS, and Reiser, xfs,
>> jfs,
>> and ext3 under Gentoo for PPC64.
>>
>> I also ran tests using Mr Bayes, ClustalW, MPIBench, and several
>> other
>> in house tests that I had available but all of these tests where
>> either inconclusive or failed to demonstrate any difference between
>> the platforms.
>>
>> I will be doing a bunch of this again here in a bit in order to get
>> data on our new OS build we are putting into production =)
>>
>>
>> On Apr 11, 2006, at 6:20 PM, Brandon Edens wrote:
>>
>>>> Yeah, from the numbers it looks as if it would be dependent on the
>>>> purpose of the cluster whether OS X or Gentoo would do better.
>>>> On ppc,
>>>> Gentoo does poorly on the first two benchmarks and also on context
>>>> switching. On x86, the first two are more comparable with RH,
>>>> but the
>>>> others, Gentoo has a small to large advantage over RH, just as
>>>> on ppc.
>>>
>>> First and second benchmarks are dhrystone and whetstone, synthetic
>>> benchmarks.
>>> I'd be wary of these types of benchmarks; they've been cheated
>>> before. I'd like
>>> to see some real-world computation benchmarks.
>>>
>>> Brandon Edens
>>>
>>
>> --gentoo-cluster@g.o mailing list
>>
>>
>
> --
> Justin Bronder
> University of Maine, Orono
>
> Advanced Computing Research Lab
> 20 Godfrey Dr
> Orono, ME 04473
> www.clusters.umaine.edu
>
> Mathematics Department
> 425 Neville Hall
> Orono, ME 04469
>
>
> --
> gentoo-cluster@g.o mailing list
>

-- 
gentoo-cluster@g.o mailing list