Computing Resources - D. Spruce (ESRF)

The ESRF computing services provides a cluster of data processing machines for general beamline access (nice) which are accessible to external users through their proposal accounts. The proposal accounts are automatically generated in the period around the dates for proposed experiments (for more details contact the ESRF user office).

The current nice cluster consists of 20 dual-core 2.6Ghz AMD CPU machines, each CPU having access to 2Gb of memory. This is due to be expanded to 50 double dual core (4 CPU’s) AMD machines with equivalent clock frequency and memory. The newer AMD chips are about 10% faster for memory intensive operations.

Experience gained in the computing group for running independant tasks on other architectures such as Xeon show that while in special cases the Xeon is faster for single tasks the performance degrades as more tasks are added such that the AMD performance is equivalent for 2 tasks and better for more than 4 tasks per machine.

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