Westmere-EP to Sandy Bridge-EP: The Scientist Potential Upgrade
by Ian Cutress on March 4, 2013 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Xeon
- Westmere-EP
- Sandy Bridge-EP
Test Setup
Alongside the X5690 CPUs we are using for this review, the Gigabyte server team was at hand to offer one of their dual processor 1366 server motherboards – the GA-7TESM. The 7TESM was released back in September 2011, featuring support for 55xx/56xx Xeons and up to 18 DIMMs of registered or unbuffered DDR3 memory – for up to 288GB at 1333 MHz with Netlist Hypercloud modules. Alongside four Intel GbE network ports (82576EB + 2x 82574L) and a management port, we get six SATA 3 Gbps ports from the chipset and 8 SAS 6 Gbps ports from an LSI SAS2008 chip (via SFF-8087), both supporting RAID 0/1/5/10. Onboard video comes from a Matrox 200e, and the system provides a PCIe 2.0 x16, an x8, an x4, and a PCI slot. Many thanks to Gigabyte for making the review possible!
Many thanks also to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with the 1250W Gold Power Supply and SATA SSD.
Thank you to Kingston for providing us with the ECC Memory.
| Test Setup | |
| Processor |
2x Intel Xeon X5690 6 Cores, 12 Threads 3.47 GHz (3.73 GHz Turbo) each |
| Motherboards | Gigabyte GA-7TESM |
| Cooling | Intel Thermal Solution STS100C |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series |
| Memory | Kingston 1600 C11 ECC 8x4GB Kit |
| Memory Settings | 1333 C9 |
| Hard Drive | Kingston 120GB HyperX |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
As per the last test with E5 2600 CPUs, we are using Windows 7 64 bit. The reason behind this is simple – in the research environment I was in, we never updated operating systems beyond security updates. IT staff wanted everyone in the building to use an approved OS image, of which there was only Windows XP, if anyone wanted network access. For this review I got in contact with a colleague to see if this is still the case, and it is – Windows XP 32-bit across the whole department at the university.
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a single 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
For the workstation theorist in a research group, power consumption is often the last thing on their minds – as long as the system computes in a decent time, everything is golden. In a commercial situation where the code works and throughput is everything, then power does matter. The Sandy Bridge-EP system used 26.3% more power during CPU load than our Westmere-EP system did, in line with the pricing of the CPU itself.
DPC Latency
Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests, such as audio, will be further down the line. So if the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled. If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time, resulting in an empty audio buffer – this leads to characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. Having a bigger buffer and correctly implemented system drivers obviously helps in this regard. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is processing DPCs from driver invocation – the lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds and taken as the peak latency while cycling through a series of short HD videos - under 500 microseconds usually gets the green light, but the lower the better.
For whatever reason the DPC Latency on the X5690 system is bad. This is more indicative of the motherboard than the CPU performance, which should easily handle DPC requests. It is highly doubtful that time sensitive work would be carried out on a system like this, but any non-Xeon product would be able to outperform our setup.
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alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - link
Sorry, I'm back. Where was I? oh yes...Unless that you were purely running single-threaded, single process jobs (or maybe even lightly multithreaded, single process jobs) - I would think that to say that it is favouring a single-CPU system might be a little bit misleading.
Even with single-socket systems, if it's got multiple cores, then you can parallelize amongst those as well.
Some commercial programs too favour 2^n cores as well, which would make quite a difference between having 8- or 16-cores vs. 6 or 12 (because some programs won't even run properly if it isn't 2^n).
Also it was interesting to see that you didn't run the implicit 3D grid solver benchmark.
Actually, MPI might not has as much to do with memory than you might think. Considering that the world's top supercomputers haven't maxed out the memory capacity per socket, I doubt that. It IS, however, much better at the actual parallelization of the task than OpenMP.
"‘Is moving from Westmere-EP to Sandy Bridge-EP a reasonable upgrade’, in the majority of our scenarios it probably is not"
It really depends. If you're writing your own code (which is what you're doing), and you have a lot of control over it, then that MIGHT be a true statement. (And it also depends on the state of your code too. If you're almost always in a permanent alpha phase (because you keep adding new capability and modules to it), then chances are, you might not even get around to parallelizing it (because you want to make sure that the base solver is robust first before you add the additional complexity of parallelization on top of that).
But if, say, suppose that you're doing research on crash and crash safety; and you're using a commercial code - some of those would just favour more cores period (see Johan's latest benchmark on the Opteron for details).
And as to whether or not you can run it on a GPU; the problem with that is that you have to make sure that every system in your working/research group has the same capable GPU hardware; otherwise, those that don't can't even run it, and those that have lesser-capable GPUs - might not get the benefits of using a GPU as much as you think, if at all.
(My GTX 660 OC's double precision performance is actually slightly SLOWER than the double precision performance of my 3930K OC'd to 4.5 GHz.)
alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - link
Also, as far as I know/can remember - not everything can make use of AVX - both in terms of programs and also in terms of fundamental math operations.And I would suspect that you might also have slight performance variations if you were to recompile on the Sandy Bridge vs. on the Westmere-EP platforms (rather than sharing the binaries between the two - unless you purposely don't make it target specific).
wingless - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
Somebody on my folding team is building this setup with dual Titans as a folding/gaming rig. The ultimate in computation, gaming, and space heating!yougotkicked - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
I just wanted to say I found this analysis rather interesting. I'm a undergrad CS major, but I work in the IT office for the chemical engineering and material science dept. at a research university, so this breakdown of the relationship between simulations and hardware was really fascinating for me.Just to give some perspective on the pricing of an OEM-built system using E5-26XX parts, one of the research groups I work with recently bought a dual E5-2687W system from HP with 128 gigs of ram, liquid cooling, and a mid-range workstation GPU; The whole system came in at over $10,000. admittedly this includes a ~$1000 monitor and 4 hard drives, but this is probably at least a 30% margin over the cost of hardware, so the 10% margin used in the article may be on the conservative side.
P.S. we didn't suggest that system to the researchers, they bought it on their own.
colonelpepper - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
HP & Dell systems are much more expensive than the same system built by a "system integrator" <-- I believe that's what they're calledI've read in other forums that system integrators building you a custom system add about 10% to the price tag.
yougotkicked - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
That sounds reasonable, my only gripe would be that many researchers would not seek out a system integrator and just turn to a big name like HP. Had they sought the advice of the IT office I would have suggested we build it in-house for no markup at all.Kevin G - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
Dell and HP's workstation lines carry a much higher premium than what you'd get DIY. The difference is in their warranties. Since dual socket workstations are effectively using low end servers in a tower chassis and they'll offer warranties very similar to what you can get for a 24/7/365 running server. While I'm not a big fan of Dell's hardware, I will say that they do follow through on their warranties. I've seen them get a replacement hard drive to my facility in under 4 hours as that is the level of support I was paying for. It wasn't cheap but it was worth it considering the business need.With the scientific slant, such warranties may turn out to be overkill as is going with OEM's. You'd still want to have the necessary data protections in place like ECC memory, redundant storage and a good backup policy while the simulation is running. However, what is the worst case that could happen when something does go wrong with the basic protections in place? Generally it is simply running the simulation again. Time is money and there are often some deadlines to meet. So if the simulation can't realistically be run again or it'd cost to much to run again, then going with an OEM that'll help achieve greater uptime is worth it.
As for the price of some of these components individually, I'm about to drop ~$1000 USD on a 128 GB memory upgrade. OEM's like Dell and HP get such parts far cheaper than DIY users due to bulk purchasing power. It is far higher than 10% margin for them in terms of raw hardware costs.
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - link
The dual E5520 systems from Dell (with 4GB RAM because research department limited us to XP 32-bit) I used for research, with basic storage and a monitor each, ran up to £2k per order back in 2009. After a month of waiting to be delivered (after tons of initial hassle with the department IT guy), it turns out the systems arrived shortly after ordering and our IT guy had decided to hide them in a different building on campus and 'forgot to tell us'. The monitors were in a building the other side of campus. Fun fun fun! Needless to say, we were all rather annoyed. But looking back, I should have just asked for a single powerful Xeon workstation.yougotkicked - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - link
Yikes, sounds like your IT guy needs to get his act together. We'd never get away with that kind of stuff here.My university has a few super-computing clusters available for researchers running truly large simulations, but because of that many groups choose not to buy systems powerful enough to run their mid-sized simulations and the clusters are usually booked a while in advance. The HP system was purchased primarily because the group was sick of waiting for their simulations to get a turn on the supercomputers.
If only there were a folding@home style client that researchers could easily program for, we could turn our computer labs into compute clusters at night.
colonelpepper - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
This would be a very poor time to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end 2600 CPUs!The Xeon 2600 series is getting a refresh soon, better to wait and get more CPU for your buck... unless you're dying to spend big $$ now that is:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zhrS1C8wbk0/UHj_HxsrMTI/...
that link is to the largest image I could find of Intel's Xeon Roadmap that was leaked late last year