PC GAMESS/Firefly-related discussion club

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Denis Zavelev
denis.zavelev@gmail.com

>just a couple of additional comments that could be of some interest.
>1. Data on our benchmarks for Core i7, Xeons 5500,
>and Phenom II are all available in the "Performance"
>section of the Firefly homepage. They could be really useful.
Thanks! I see that Core i7 (as well as in ixbt benchmarks) works only 10-15% faster than Phenom II x4.
As for Xeon, the only reason to build workstation on Xeon is the ability to use 2CPU MB in order to obtain second CPU (with its bank of RAM) later.
As for SAS HDD or SDDs, I'm afraid we'll never be able to spend money for them...

>> Is that true that non-ECC RAM can be the reason of
>> segmentation fault?
>2. High-quality non-ECC RAM can work for years in
>non-stop mode. However, I personally prefer to use
>ECC RAM if possible.
>> Is that true that ECC RAM will make the workstation CPU
>> (like Core i7) work slower?
>3. This can be the case but is not always true.
If so, what's the reason to use ECC RAM with Core i7 or Phenom X2? (Of course it's obvious to use it with Xeon).

>4. As to SSDs... we are now working on the reoptimization of
>Firefly's I/O routines for SSDs as we now have very fast SSD at hands
Are you really sure that SSDs have big enough MTBF?

And several more questions:
1. Is call64 option currently available for Phenom II? How much RAM can Firefly use?
2. Is that true that sometimes cache files can be 100-200 Gb or more for any CPU core?
3. Is there any reason to use SAS HDDs instead of SATA II? Is there OK to have 1HDD per 2 CPU cores or it's better to use separate HDD per each core. Or maybe it doesn't matter and SATA II data transfer rate will be enough for most tasks?

[ This message was edited on Sat Sep 5 '09 at 11:01am by the author ]