Posts

Showing posts from September, 2018

How to use the AMD Threadripper 2990 WX for Scientific Computations

Image
The AMD Threadripper 2990 WX is a processor suitable for scientific computations but since only two of its four NUMA nodes have direct memory access it is difficult to exploit its power completely. Its main advantages are price / thread - about 1800/64 = 28.125 $/thread power consumption / thread - 250/64 = 3.9 W/thread up to 350/64 = 5,4 W/thread overclocked These numbers look much worse if we don't utilize all 64 parallel threads, so we have to find a way to use them all thereby minimizing the penalty caused by the NUMA architecture of the 2990 WX. Overclocking / Power Efficiency Since power consumption grows super-linear with clock speed only limited overclocking (<= 3.8Ghz all cores) makes sense. In my experience using a fixed processor speed increases stability for specific VCore (I used VCore=1.25V for 3.8GHZ), but limits single core performance. Power consumption relative to performance is best at stock speed but can further be optimized lowering VCore (undervoltin...