( ESNUG 379 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [10/11/01]
Subject: ( ESNUG 373 #8 ) Flaws In The Solaris 7.0 vs. Linux PC Benchmark
> The systems I used were a Sun Enterprise 420 (4x450MHz processor) running
> Solaris 7 and a VA Linux Systems 2200 Series 2U Linux Server (2x800MHz
> Pentium III) running Red Hat Linux 6.2. A direct MHz speed comparison has
> the PC running 1.8x Mhz of the Sun.
>
> The following table lists the values reported back from the Unix "time"
> command on a couple of small synthesis jobs.
>
> job cpu Sun cpu Linux PC ratio
> 1 3059 sec 1715 sec 1.8x
> 2 652 347 1.9x
>
> Seems to track the MHz scale fairly nicely.
>
> - Scott Evans
> Sonics Inc. Mountain View, CA
From: Frank Wolff <wolff@eecs.cwru.edu>
Hi John,
I have a problem with the way these benchmarks are being compared. There
seems to be a underlying assumption that the application software can
distribute the workload to other processors. Application software and its
associated algorithms have to be specifically written to do this.
Observe that, 800 Mhz / 450 Mhz is 1.78 (i.e. 1.8). That would seems to
indicate that the EDA tool is written for a uniprocessor (i.e. no "fork()",
process spawning, etc). Slightly higher numbers (1.9), indicated that the
other processor is being used for doing strictly operating systems functions
used by the application software (i.e. heavy I/O, page swapping).
Correct me, if I am wrong on this point.
- Frank Wolff
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Scott Evans <scott@sonicsinc.com>
Frank,
I had no intent to imply that any speed-up came from running on a
multi-processor machine. I was only reporting on the hardware I ran on
for completeness. As you mentioned, the other processor's are likely
being used for OS and other tasks which allows the single threaded DC
shell to hopefully use close to 100% of the CPU it has been allocated to.
- Scott Evans
Sonics Inc. Mountain View, CA
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Frank Wolff <wolff@eecs.cwru.edu>
Hi, Scott,
Thanks for your response. My personal experience is that EDA/IT support
people want to dump and jump to Linux-based Intel machines because they see
results like this. It would be nice if multi-processor benchmarks will list
the average CPU utilization of "each processor" during the run of the
application.
This benchmark makes an important statement (some will say, slam) to Sun
Microsystems in the EDA world to help EDA tool developers to re-write their
software for multi-processors. Clearly, synthesis and P&R tools are CPU
intensive and the speed demons are winning. But sooner or later, the speed
demons of the world will hit the brick wall, too.
In the limit, EDA vendors who still have single thread software will not
survive. Ironically, at this year's DAC, Avanti has already rewritten some
of their products for multi-threads (of course, you must acquire additional
licenses!) showing performance gains. While sitting at this presentation,
it was amazing how many decision makers didn't understand these issues.
- Frank Wolff
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Scott Evans <scott@sonicsinc.com>
Frank,
As an EDA user I'd much prefer to buy a $5K Linux machine which will run my
jobs twice as fast (hopefully up to 4x with the 2.1 GHz machines but things
don't always scale directly) than $100K for another dc_shell license to
accomplish the same task on the Sun Solaris box. So lump me in the category
of dump and jump... I agree we need to better specify what we're comparing.
As you mention, the licensing issue is likely the sticky point for the EDA
vendors/users to work out. DC has a top down compile mode which allows
you to run multiple jobs concurrently (definitely not what you would call
multi-threading) but each one requires it's own license so is not of much
use to companies with limited budgets. As long as the computer companies
keeping coming out with bigger/faster boxes there's not much incentive for
EDA vendors to deal with multi-threading their algorithms to improve
performance. My crystal ball doesn't tell me how far away is that brick
wall you mention.
- Scott Evans
Sonics Inc. Mountain View, CA
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