Re: What is the fastest machine for Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg13606] Re: What is the fastest machine for Mathematica?
- From: dek at socrates.cgl.ucsf.edu (David Konerding)
- Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 03:08:09 -0400
- Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
- References: <6q3qkj$f19@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In article <6q3qkj$f19 at smc.vnet.net>, Christian Keysers wrote: >We are currently running mathematica on a Silicon Graphics Ingigo 2 >machine with a 200Mhz processor and 256Mb Ram. The calculations involve >fitting of gaussians to data set, and take two long at present (2h30min >for each data set requiring 16 * 8 fits). Does anybody know what >machines may bring the best speed for that kind of computations? The >benchmark sites available in the net only contain data for relatively >slow machines (Dec Alphas, Mac, Pentiums). We were thinking of getting >an Origin 2000, but even these machines only get really fast with >multiple processors (not supported by mathematica). So if anybody has a >really fast machine, let me know! DEC Alpha -- slow machine!? I suspect the benchmarks (which I've never looked at) are a bit out of date. Newer DEC Alphas- such as the EV6 600MHz, which should be available pretty soon- should handily exceed the speed of your Indigo2/200MHz. However, an O2000 would be no slouch either. Compare the specFP measures for the Alpha 600MHz and the R10000/250MHz-- that's a decent measure for your task, which would be primarily floating point and memory IO bound. However, I suspect that if you really really wanted to speed execution of your data fitting, some optimized C code could outperform Mathematica. There will always be some overhead associated with running Mathematica code; I don't know how significant this will be, it really depends on the routines you are using. Dave -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Email: dek at cgl.ucsf.edu David Konerding WWW: http://picasso.ucsf.edu/~dek -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Snail: Graduate Group in Biophysics Medical Sciences 926, Box 0446 University of California San Francisco, CA 94143