[Kailee71]

Hello all,

I recently got an HP DL380P with (only) 2x E5-2630v1, 16x 2Rx4Gb 1333 DDR3 (64Gb total), and through the excellent iLO I can also monitor power draw (see attached image). I'll do some comparisons of bare metal Ubuntu 20.04, ESXi 6.7, Win10 WSL, and lastly Freenas with an Ubuntu VM (just for kicks). All will use OF7 from .org natively installed through their Ubuntu repository, so no software optimizing at all.

To start off, here's Ubuntu 20.04:

SnappyHexMesh
Cores	Pwr(W)	Time(s)	kWh
1	147	2447	0.100
2	158	1557	0.068
4	207	906	0.052
6	223	636	0.039
8	240	522	0.035
12	275	422	0.032

Sim
Cores	Pwr(W)	Time(s)	kWh
1	162	1252	0.056
2	184	645	0.033
4	256	290	0.021
6	288	211	0.017
8	320	176	0.016
12	358	149	0.015

Interesting to me is the last column; certainly for SHM, but also the sim itself, it seems with this setup that using all cores is advisable; of course these CPUs only have 6 cores so are not being bottlenecked by the quad channel memory. However, if one were to extrapolate from these values it seems that we're close to a sweet spot power-draw wise - it's flattening off at 12 used cores, whereas I would expect another 2 or even 4 cores per CPU would reduce runtimes, if maybe only a little with 10c/cpu over the 8c/cpu.

However: I take away from this that running all 12 cores reduces cost of the benchmark by 2/3 for SHM, and nearly 3/4 for the sim, when compared to running single-core.

Results using VMs on the same hardware will follow over the next few days.

Cheers,

Kai.