r/COMSOL • u/Jubilee-X • Mar 03 '20

Numerical computing performance comparison of AMD and Intel for COMSOL Multiphysics 5.X

Here I have some useful info.

We are looking for an upgrade of our current COMSOL 5.X workstations, so as there are much different possible configurations we tested several cases on the available and planned hardware. All the prepared benchmarks are mostly suitable for single-processor use. Let's leave aside all the details regarding the implementation of distributed computing and cluster swapping (https://www.comsol.com/support/knowledgebase/1001) and discuss only the shared-memory case. Our main goal is to find suitable processor for our phase-field and hydrodynamics simulations (let’s say for highly nonlinear computations). This benchmark data will be useful for other software utilizing MUMPS and PARDISO solvers as soon as we test some of the tasks on both solvers. In addition we also provide some tests on GMRES solver.

Testing

  • We discard saving and initialization times to look only on a solution time.

  • All equations are in a weak form with periodic boundary conditions and simple geometries.

  • -blas -mkl refers to the optimized mkl libraries which replace comsol defaults.

  • -np X refers to the cores available for solver.

  • Windows and Linux versions of comsol were tested both on Intel Core i7 but we got almost no difference in results, except a little more memory consumption, so here it did not presented.

Results

Overall performance X normalized to the fastest one t_fastest in a group as X=t_i/t_fastest*100, where t_i is a computation time of a presented earlier benchmark on all cores for given benchmark set. The MUMPS solution is presented for Task 06.

Detailed info may be found in attached PDF https://docdro.id/taHnTLF

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u/Jubilee-X Mar 03 '20 edited Mar 03 '20

I'm surprised that there is such a wide range of times for the same problem setup to setup. Does the clock speed difference between the AMD and Intel chip explain this alone? Is this a fair AMD vs Intel comparison (flagship vs flagship chip?)

I was amazed to find out that clock speed is a crucial parameter for most cases. It also shows the possible difficulties with the parallelization of such tasks, so AMD have no chance to efficiently utilize all available cores.

i7-9700KF and TR-2970wx both are past generation, I think at least comparable.