Re: What is the fastest machine for Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg13711] Re: What is the fastest machine for Mathematica?
- From: Richard Easther <easther at het.brown.edu>
- Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 01:38:06 -0400
- Organization: High Energy Theory Group, Physics Dept, Brown University
- References: <6q3qkj$f19@smc.vnet.net> <6qp363$ajc@smc.vnet.net> <6r10id$fj5@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Vladimir Radionov wrote: > > Actually it's http://fampm201.tu-graz.ac.at/karl/timings30.html I have been looking at these tests, and I have been wondering whether anyone can shed any light on what the critical factors are that affect Mathematica performance - ie memory, CPU type, cache, disk I/0, floating point performance or integer.... Or do the tests listed on this page not really give an accurate guide to performance? In particular, I ran the benchmark on an UltraSparc with 4 300MHz processors, 1 GB of RAM and 4 MB of cache per cpu (I think), and got a benchmark score of less than 1.0, which is the sort of result seen with a 166MhZ Pentium. There is a couple of reason why I might get sluggish performace from this machine, as (for various reasons) the Mathematica files all live on a remotely mounted disk, connected via a fairly slow network, so disk I/0 is bad. Likewise, we are running the 3.0 kernel, and we are a beta site for Solaris 2.7, both of which may (potentially) lead to sub-optimal performance, I suppose. We are about to install the 3.0.2 release of Mathematica, and will put it on a disk which is attached directly to the machine, and Solaris 2.7 is close to being finished, so we are in a position to isolate any problems that are specific to our local setup. I do not have exact benchmarks on hand which compare the UltraSparc to the Pentium, but for all other applications it "feels" a lot faster than a Pentium 166.... Or has Wolfram simply put a lot more effort into optimising the Mathematica code for Intel chips than it has for the Sparcs? Any comments? Richard