[CPMD-list] Thinking about buying an AMD Opteron system...

[Francesco Filippone]

On Mon, 19 May 2003, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:

> 
> > importantly, I am hoping to find out for sure if an Opteron based machine will 
> > be able to allocate more than 1 Gb of memory to a single process.  If I do 
> > make the purchase, I would use the 64 bit version of Mandrake Linux 9.0 and 
> > the 64 bit version of the PGI compiler.
> 
> well, you also need a very well optimized LAPACK/BLAS implementation.
> e.g. for the amd athlon platform this can mean a 2x speedup for CPMD runs
> (up to 8x for DGEMM). AFAIK, there is no such optimized LAPACK/BLAS
> available (yet). you should check the ATLAS homepage 
> <http://math-atlas.sf.net> to be sure. 
> 
Dear Mark & Axel,
only a note. There is a library developed by AMD, AMD Core Math Library 
(ACML), that should be the analogous of Intel MKL. I just checked for its 
existence, since I've not an AMD box yet, but I'm going to buy one. 
The library is designed for Opteron processors and incorporates support 
for BLAS, LAPACK and FFT routines. Seems to be free, but I've not 
downloaded it yet. Maybe it's worth to be downloaded and tested by those 
of the CPMD community who have already an AMD box available. They don't 
mention any possibility of using the library with 32-bit processors, but 
they give a 32-bit mode library. 

The link for the ACML page is 
http://www.developwithamd.com/acml/welcome/

Hope this helps,
ciao,
F.

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