Numerical calculations of electromagnetic fields are labor intensive, especially in three dimensions. I often hear from customers contemplating a new computer purchase who want to know what is the fastest machine. I find it difficult to give a useful answer because I am just as confused by the cloudy specifications issued by chip and computer manufacturers as everyone else.
As a case in point, I noticed that the cheap computer I bought to read E mail at our weekend cabin seemed to run unusually fast. I described it in the posting What computer to buy. It was an HP Pavilion with an Intel Core2Duo chip (E8400, 3.00 GHz) running Vista 64 Home Premium. I decided to make a direct comparison with my pricey HP XW6200 Workstation with dual Xeon processors at 3.2 GHz running XP64 Potentate Edition. I used the 64-bit version of Magnum compiled with Intel Visual FORTRAN 9 (EM64T). The results were totally surprising but exactly what you’d expect. The cheap computer completed the run in 5154 seconds while the workstation clocked in at 8754 seconds, 70% longer! This trend was confirmed by a friend who recently purchased a Dell Precision T5400 with dual Xeon processors in response to the astounding benchmark performance figures supplied by the manufacturer. The performance running real programs was little better than his old computer.
Viewed in a different way, I could have bought 2.5 cheap computers for the price I paid for the workstation. In the end, I would have had four times the computing power! If you have Magnum and want to check how your machine stacks up against my miraculous discount special, here are links to input files for the benchmark example.
MetaMesh input: speedtest.min
Magnum input: speedtest.gin
Please let me know your results.