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Date:      Thu, 16 Sep 1999 21:42:34 -0300 (EST)
From:      Fabio Cesar Gozzo <fabio@iqm.unicamp.br>
To:        somsky@annwn.phys.washington.edu (William R. Somsky)
Cc:        freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Examples of FreeBSD SMP success?
Message-ID:  <199909170042.VAA06428@thomson.iqm.unicamp.br>
In-Reply-To: <19990916171751.A19950@annwn.phys.washington.edu> from "William R. Somsky" at "Sep 16, 1999  5:17:51 pm"

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William R. Somsky wrote:
>We're considering getting several Intel-based machines here in
>the UW Physics department for use as desktop work- and computation-
>stations, and the question has come up whether we would gain much
>by getting dual-CPU (say dual 500 MHZ Pentium-III) as opposed to
>single-CPU systems.
>
>The anticipated use where dual-CPUs could help us would probably
>be users either running a computation-intensive job (eg, Mathematica),
>while simultaneously doing desktop editing/browsing/mailing/TeXing/etc,
>or running two computation- intensive jobs.  (We don't expect that
>Mathematica or any user job will be multi threaded.)
>
>What I've been asked to find out what the state of FreeBSD SMP
>support is, and if anyone has any real-world examples of using
>dual-CPUs under FreeBSD that might be similar to this sort of
>situation and what the results have been.  
>
>Being as that I've not tried multi-processing under FreeBSD yet,
>does anybody have any input I can give to my users?

I have been used FreeBSD with SMP machines since pre-3.0
for computational chemistry programs and this system has
shown to be a very good choice because:
1) FreeBSD SMP is rock solid. I had jobs that took weeks burnning
CPU and eating memory/disk resources without a single problem.
2) The cost/performance for this kind of programs is excelent. You 
just pay for another processor (ok, the MB is also more expensive)
and you almost double the performance. I have compared the time
required by two sequential jobs with two jobs in parallel and got
a ratio around 1.8. It was a Dual PII 300 Mhz and this ratio
can be better now with the 100Mhz bus of the new PIII's.
Oh, my programs aren't multithread too.
In conclusion, all I have to say is go for it !
Regards,


-- 
**************************************************
Fabio Gozzo                   fabio@iqm.unicamp.br
State University of Campinas               UNICAMP
Chemistry Institute  http://thomson.iqm.unicamp.br
**************************************************


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