[Beowulf] ECC

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 11/5/12 8:50 AM, "Douglas Eadline" <deadline at eadline.org> wrote:

>
>--snip--
>
>>>
>>>More interesting is the ECC discussion.
>>>
>>>ECC is simply a requirement IMHO, not a 'luxury thing' as some
>>>hardware engineers see it.
>>
>> Depends on your computational model.  Would you rather spend money on
>>ECC
>> or on more processors?
>> ECC comes at a cost in speed as well.  There is some non-zero time
>> required to compute the syndrome bits and do the correction on the read.
>> Sure, you can pipeline it, but there's some extra latency inevitably
>> added.
>>
>
>I find it interesting that many users thought GPU's could not be
>a research tool unless they had ECC memory. I have one associate who
>turns it off because they get 10% better performance on their
>Amber runs.
>

Precisely...

Assuming one can tell if one's simulation results are "good", this is a
good strategy.