you can find this thread by clicking here if you wish. saw this posted over at [H], it was posted by JCH, thought some of you would like to give it a look...
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JCH said:I'm giving this it's own thread, since it will be easier to find if other people are interested, plus it will give them a place to post their own results.
I promised in AtomicMoose's thread about "Intel upping the ante" that I'd post the results of folding with Hyperthreading turned on and off on my new server. Ok, here ya go.
Test platform:
- Dell Poweredge 1600SC server, BIOS ver. A00
- Single Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz CPU w/512K cache, 400 MHz FSB,
- 512 MB DDR SDRAM,
- Dell PERC3/SC SCSI RAID controller, three 18 GB 10K rpm SCSI drives, RAID 5
- Windows 2000 Server, SP3, all critical updates applied
- member server, not domain controller
- basic Win2K services running, plus Symantec Corporate Antivirus 8.0
- server isn't doing anything else, currently on my lab bench for *cough* burn-in before I move it into production.
I installed FAH3Console 3.14 in two separate folders. I ran each instance solo, and set up the config with different machine IDs. One instance got a p184 protein, the other got a p185, both 9-pointers.
I disabled Hyperthreading in the BIOS and ran the P185 instance for a while, saved the log, then ran the P184 instance and saved the log. I shut the system down, enabled Hyperthreading, and started both instances simultaneously. After it had run for a while, looked at the logs again and I manually calculated the frame times from the logs. Here are the results (times are minutes:seconds):
WITHOUT HYPERTHREADING (so only running one instance at a time):
p184 - 11:53 per frame average
p185 - 11:53 per frame average
WITH HYPERTHREADING (running two instances at the same time):
p184 - 15:38 per frame average
p185 - 15:38 per frame average
These proteins run on TINKER cores. No way to test GROMACS at the moment, since they aren't handing them out right now.
The result for these 9.0-point proteins is 10.91 points per day with Hyperthreading OFF and 16.58 points per day with Hyperthreading ON, so about a 52% increase in folding output per day.
This means that, in this specific case, enabling Hyperthreading is like adding another half of a CPU to your system.
Remember, this is on a 400 MHz FSB P4-based Xeon running in a server, not a regular P4, so you may or may not see similar behavior in a desktop system.
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