Dell PowerEdge R820 - Manual (Page 18)

Performance Analysis of HPC Applications on Several Dell PowerEdge 12 th Generation Servers
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4.6. MILC
Figure 10 illustrates that as the core count increases the Dell PowerEdge M620 outperforms the
PowerEdge M420 and the PowerEdge R820 when running the MILC application. MILC is sensitive to
memory bandwidth while core speed and Turbo Boost do not contribute to the difference in
performance in this scenario. The memory bandwidth per core is ~30 percent lower on the PowerEdge
R820 when compared to the PowerEdge M620 and is ~25 percent lower on the PowerEdge M420 when
compared to the PowerEdge M620. When fully subscribed, the PowerEdge M420 performs 21 to 33
percent less than the PowerEdge M620 and the PowerEdge R820 performs 11 to 39 percent less than
the PowerEdge M620s. However, for a fixed cluster size, fewer PowerEdge R820 servers will be needed
because it is a four socket system.
MILC performance Figure 10.
4.7. NAMD
Figure 11 plots NAMD performance on the three clusters. From the figure it is observed that the Dell
PowerEdge M420 performs consistently lower than the PowerEdge M620 by 10 percent. NAMD is not
memory bandwidth sensitive and the delta in performance can be attributed to the 15 percent drop in
core frequency. There were issues running NAMD fully subscribed on more than one server on the
PowerEdge R820 platform. The authors are working towards resolution with the NAMD developers.
0.72
0.80
0.90
1.32
0.75
0.81 0.83
0.80
0.82
0.00
0.20
0.40
0.60
0.80
1.00
1.20
1.40
256 128 64 32 16
Per
fo
rmance
rel
at
ive
to Power
Ed
ge
M620
(hig
her
is B
et
ter)
Number of Cores
M620-2.7GHz R820-2.7GHz M420-2.3GHz