Xeon SETI

[Player0]

For under $2000, I can get a Quad PIII 550mhz 2m Xeon server. I've always wanted to build one of these ever since I was talking about it with BKPaul back in the day. Anyway, Seti might be the perfect excuse for me to get one of these puppies. Of course, for about the same price, I can get a dual MP2100+ machine.

Now, I've heard that Seti benefits heavily from big L2 cache. Certainly the 2m endowed Xeons have the 256k of the MPs beat hands down. But does it make that much difference?

My regular PIII 500mhz system takes just under 12:30h to complete a WU. My XP2100+ do them in 3:15h. I figgure a dedicated dual MP2100+ should spit out a WU in every 90 minutes.

Will a quad PIII xeon machine beat that? On a good day, four regular PIII 500mhz should do a WU every 3 hours. The Xeon version would have to be 2x as fast as the standard desktop version to compete with the AMD MPs. And be more than 2x as fast to actually beat the MPs.

But, thats all speculation. It might take dual MPs much longer than 90 minutes per WU anyway, depending on other factors in the SMP world.

I may or may not get a SMP machine for seti. Really do need a new bed and couch. Trying to keep up with Mike is a lot of work hehe. Thoughts?

[lechumbl]

Wow Man,

You will spare no expense to catch me, huh??:D

Take care.......

[Player0]

Lee, not even gonna try hehe :)

[MrP]

stats for a similar setup, but running at 700mhz

3hr 56min 31.5sec Ave
4hr 44min 58.0sec Max
0hr 05min 05.0sec Min

think you can disregard the min, duff unit!!!

thanks to Q from TP for the stats

toodles :xsofa:

[NorthernYankee]

From what I remember a duallie will not halve the time of a unit. Its better I believe to have each CPU crunch its own unit. But I could be wrong.

--NY

[Player0]

NY, id have four instances of Seti running...one for each cpu.

hmm...so i guess the 2m cache really does help.

is that 700 running 100 or 133fsb?


at least the MPs i can overclock a little.

[kms]

cache speed / size helps in a big way, back in the slot athy days faster cache and slower chip crunched quicker than a faster chip and slower cache, bigger caches crunch insanely quick!! will be interesting to see what you decide :)

[LinearB]

Never did any real measurements but my MP1600's would knock out two Seti unit in around 4 to 4.5 hours. Limiting the duals to just one instance knocked around 30 minutes off the time (for just one unit). Hence two processor aren't twice as fast but they get there in the end.

Will have to run some timings on my quad AMD XP1700 (4x PcChips 841 ;) ) to see how it compares to your Xenon server.

[Mulda]

Increased cache size helps as the entire code and data can be loaded into it reducing the dependence on fetching data from RAM.

A dual MP2100 would be faster than the Quad Xeon 550/2M, but not as fast as 2 single XP2100's. The AMD 760MP/MPX chipsets have poor memory bandwidth compared with single CPU chipsets and has 2 CPU's fighting for that bandwidth.