AMD Ryzen 7950X Scientific Computing Performance – 7 Optimized Applications

This post presents scientific application performance testing on the new AMD Ryzen 7950X. I am impressed! Seven applications that are heavy parallel numerical compute workloads were tested. The 7950X outperformed the Ryzen 5950X by as much as 25-40%. For some of the applications it provided nearly 50% of the performance of the much larger and more expensive Threadripper Pro 5995WX 64-core processor. That’s remarkable for a $700 CPU! The Ryzen 7950X is not in the same platform class as the Tr Pro but it is a respectable, budget friendly, numerical computing processor.

WSL2 vs Linux (HPL HPCG NAMD)

We’ve been curious about the performance of WSL for scientific applications and decided to do a few relevant benchmarks. This is also a teaser for some hardware-specific optimized application containerization that I’ve been working on!

Molecular Dynamics Benchmarks GPU Roundup GROMACS NAMD2 NAMD 3alpha on 12 GPUs

We have a new collection of GPU accelerated Molecular Dynamics benchmark packages put together for GROMACS, NAMD 2, and NAMD 3-alpha10. (The benchmark packages will be available to the public soon.) In this post we present results for,
– 3 applications: GROMACS, NAND 2 and NAMD 3alpha10,
– 8 MD simulations,
– 12 different NVIDIA GPUs,
– 96 total results.

LTSP Configuration for Benchmark Platform of Diskless Workstations

In this post we look at using a testing Lab of Windows systems as a benchmarking platform for Linux scientific application using network boot with nfsroot and home mounts. Linux is boot on the systems “diskless” leaving the Windows installs untouched. LTSP turned out to be a great time saver for setting up the configuration.

Does Enabling WSL2 Affect Performance of Windows 10 Applications

WSL2 offers improved performance over version 1 by providing more direct access to the host hardware drivers. Recent “Insider Dev Channel” builds of Win10 even allows access to the Windows NVIDIA display driver for GPU computing applications for WSL2 Linux applications! The performance improvements with WSL2 are largely because this version is running as a privileged virtual machine on to of MS Hyper-V. This means that at least low level support for the Hyper-V virtualization layer needs to be enabled to use it. In particular, the Windows feature “VirtualMachinePlatform” must be enabled for WSL2. We tested to see if there was any negative application performance impact.

Intel Broadwell Xeon E5 2600v4 performance test

The Intel Xeon E5 2600 v4 Broadwell processors are finally available. My first Linpack testing with a E5-2687W v4 shows a greater than 35% performance increase over the v3 Haswell version! And, it’s the same price as the v3 version! It’s significantly better than expected.

Xeon E5 v3 Haswell-EP Performance — Linpack

The Intel Xeon E5 v3 Haswell EP processors are here. The floating point performance on these new processors is outstanding. We run a Linpack benchmark on a dual Xeon E5-2687W v3 system and show how it stacks up against several processors.

Memory Performance for Intel Xeon Haswell-EP DDR4

Memory bandwidth is often an important factor for compute or data intensive workloads. The STREAM benchmark has been used for may years as a measure of this bandwidth. We present STREAM results for the new Xeon E5 v3 Haswell processor with DDR4 memory and compare this with an Xeon E5 v2 Ivy Bridge system.