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I don't remember, because the measurements on the £1M purchase was maybe five years ago, but they taught a useful lesson. I didn't see figures in what I was responding to. If I'd had more influence on the purchase, as opposed to observing the process, we wouldn't have ended up with a pure sandybridge system, which was a mistake. Anyhow, my all-free-software version of cp2k was faster on it than an all-Intel version on slightly faster CPUs on an otherwise equivalent cluster. I measured and paid attention to the MPI, which benefited everything using alltoallv. The large core-count AMD boxes were simply a better bet for the range of work on a university HPC system. It's not as if most codes topped out an arithmetic intensity and there was a serious problem with serial performance, even if MKL had been significantly better than the free libraries, which it wasn't.

For a recent exercise, spending rather more money on AMD CPUs for the UK Tier 1 system, look at the Archer2 reference and benchmarking for it. It's expected to run large amounts of VASP-like code; www.archer.ac.uk publishes usage of the current system. Circumstances differ, and I'm pointing out contrary experience, understanding the measurements and what determined them.



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