I'm sure that many of you also got the marketing email today entitled "SGI Altix outperforms AMD Dual-core Opteron Systems". Have not read the paper yet, just passing along the actual URL to the paper ... Skipping the intro and setup pages, the actual PDF is here: http://www.sgi.com/pdfs/3905.pdf Excerpt: > Standard benchmark test cases from the following chemistry > applications were used: > • Gaussian 03 rev C.02 (Gaussian) > • DMol3 from Accelrys® Materials Studio® (Accelrys) > • CASTEP from Accelrys Materials Studio (Accelrys) > • VASP (University of Vienna), > • NAMD (University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne), > • Sander (Amber), and > • PMEMD (Amber) > Results of the tests revealed that the SGI Altix 330 using shared > memory and unmatched I/O throughput achieved superior > performance and ran faster than twice the number of cores in > comparable AMD dual core Opteron-based systems. > In addition, a Parallel Throughput System test revealed that the > SGI Altix 330 built on SGI NUMAflex™ architecture experienced > only 1% degradation in performance when running Gaussian > test397 on a fully loaded system (24.4 minutes on a fully loaded > system compared to 24.1 minutes in a stand alone test) as compared > to a 33% degradation in performance for the comparable > AMD dual core Opteron-based system (71 minutes on a fully > loaded system compared to 53 minutes in a stand alone test). > Regards, Chris