Hi. I've been running some nonlinear models using CosmosWorks
2007 SP4 on one of two machines. One machine is a Dell M60 Laptop
with a 2 Ghz Pentium M and 2GB of RAM. The other is a Dell PWS380
Desktop with a 3 Ghz Pentium D Dual Core CPU and 3GB of RAM. Both
are running XP SP2 and both have antivirus turned off for runs. I
have also tried the following both with and without the /3GB
switch. The model I am running is small enough that it is not
hitting swap.
I did some benchmarking between the two machines, expecting that the desktop would be faster.
Running the "Passmark Performance Test 6.1" program on both gave the kind of results I expected showing that the PWS380 was faster almost across the board. Most importantly I would think for Cosmos was that its Floating Point Math was over twice as fast and both memory access and disk access were faster. For some reason the two machines were almost tied in 2 areas, finding prime numbers, and allocating small block memory.
So, I was surprised that when I ran the same Cosmos analysis on each one, my laptop took 3 hours and the PWS 380 took 4!
According to the Cosmos Knowledge Base Cosmos does support multiple processors. See "How do I choose a solver" ID: 80 and "Usage of multiple CPUs and influence on solution time" ID: x385 includes Dual Core CPU's.
I am using the Direct Sparse Solver as recommended and have checked that both CPU's are checked off under "Task Manager, Processes, Set Affinity" yet I can't get CPU utilization above 50% when running analayses on the Dual Core machine, versus the 100% I get on the single core laptop.
Am I missing something?
Thanks.
-Mike Atlas
I did some benchmarking between the two machines, expecting that the desktop would be faster.
Running the "Passmark Performance Test 6.1" program on both gave the kind of results I expected showing that the PWS380 was faster almost across the board. Most importantly I would think for Cosmos was that its Floating Point Math was over twice as fast and both memory access and disk access were faster. For some reason the two machines were almost tied in 2 areas, finding prime numbers, and allocating small block memory.
So, I was surprised that when I ran the same Cosmos analysis on each one, my laptop took 3 hours and the PWS 380 took 4!
According to the Cosmos Knowledge Base Cosmos does support multiple processors. See "How do I choose a solver" ID: 80 and "Usage of multiple CPUs and influence on solution time" ID: x385 includes Dual Core CPU's.
I am using the Direct Sparse Solver as recommended and have checked that both CPU's are checked off under "Task Manager, Processes, Set Affinity" yet I can't get CPU utilization above 50% when running analayses on the Dual Core machine, versus the 100% I get on the single core laptop.
Am I missing something?
Thanks.
-Mike Atlas
The Pentium M processor was the basis for the new Intel Core architecture series of processors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2
A new Core 2 Duo or even better a Core 2 Quad would give you much better performance. They basically smoke the old Pentium 4's if you get an E6600 or better C2D.
Cheers,