Firefly and PC GAMESS-related discussion club

 
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Thomas H.
thomas.hochrein@web.de

Which configuration should be better according to the computing time:
a)     24 Core AMD Opteron (e. g. Dual-CPU AMD Opteron 6168 (12 core)) or
b)     12 Core Intel Nehalem (e. g. Dual-CPU Intel Xeon L5640 (6 core))?

If I take a look to the published Firefly performance tests I see only a significant computing time difference between Intel and AMD if a low number (one or two) cores are used. If more cores are used the computing time difference is quite small, so the number of cores are more important. So I would prefer the configuration with 24 cores AMD Opteron instead of only 12 cores Intel Nehalem. Am I right?

I was wondering, weather this is right in case of Firefly, because in case of ADF/BAND I got the information of the supplier, that there is no significant difference in the computing time between 24 cores AMD Opteron and 12 cores Intel Nehalem, because of the multi-threading functionality of the Intel Nehalem cores. And because of the lower needed number of cores in case of Intel the memory size can be reduced in comparison to the AMD CPU. So finally the Intel version would be preferable in the case of ADF/BAND.

And one more question: Is there a significant difference in the computing time between the Firefly Windows (Win 7, 64 bit) and Linux version (also 64 bit)?

Thanks in advance,

Thomas