Dear list,

looks like I have to repeat my message of yesterday, possibly because I
had originally subscribed with a different email address. So, here it goes
again:

I am planning to build or buy a 4-cpu linux cluster mainly to run ADF and
Gaussian 03. I am wondering if anybody on this list can share some
experiences regarding the use of Athlon or P4 based PCs for that purpose,
or whether there is some sort of benchmarking available for the two
processors. From what I gather on the internet, Athlon XP still seems to
have the better FPU power, unless one can utilize the P4's SSE2 extension
to its instruction set. IIRC SSE2 is supported in the more recent linux
kernels, but is it utilized in ADF and does ADF actually run faster on a
P4 compared to an XP? Due to budget limitations I am currently looking at
either a Xeon P4 system or four individual P4 or Athlon PCs strung
together with 1 GB/s ethernet.

What is actually the bottleneck in a typical ADF calculation, say a
geometry optimization of a 50-100 atom molecule? Is it processor speed,
memory bus speed, disk IO, ...?

Thank you very much in advance for any help you can give me in deciding on
the right system.

Best regards, Alex.
Received on 2003-06-03 15:15:29