Specifications

LINPACK
Computers use double-precision floating-point mathematics to perform calculations
requiring great numerical magnitude or extremely high decimal accuracy. Apple used
the LINPACK benchmark to illustrate the benefits of the G5 processor’s two floating-
point units. LINPACK measures double-precision floating-point performance running
a program that solves a dense system of linear equations.
Bioinformatics Benchmark System (BBSv3)
The Bioinformatics Benchmark System is based on current, popular applications and
data sets from the bioinformatics community. As a result, this benchmark is representa-
tive of the day-to-day workload of a typical research scientist. The current benchmark
uses bioinformatics application suites NCBI BLAST and HMMER as the workload. For
this benchmark, Apple used FASTA databases dated January 1, 2005; NCBI BLAST
version 2.2.10; and HMMER version 2.3.2.
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Technology Overview
Xserve G5
LINPACK Benchmark: Double Precision
PowerPC G5
Dual 2.3GHz
Intel Xeon
Dual 3.4GHz
AMD Opteron
Dual 250 (2.4GHz)
10.3 gigaflops
10.5 gigaflops
8.3 gigaflops
Billions of floating-point operations per second (gigaflops)—longer bars are better
246 8 1210
The dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5 is capable of 10.3 billion double-precision floating-point
operations per second.
Testing conducted by Apple in January 2005 using preproduction Xserve G5 systems. All systems were configured with
4GB of RAM. Results based on the LINPACK benchmark (www.netlib.org/benchmark/1000d) using a matrix size of 15,000
and the following operating systems/compilers/math libraries: Xserve G5 = Mac OS X Server 10.3.7/XLF 040108a/Accelerate
Framework; AMD Opteron = Red Hat Ent Linux 3, Update 3 ES AMD64/pgf90 5.2-4/libgoto_opt64p-r0.96; Intel Xeon = Red
Hat Ent Linux 3, Update 3 ES x86/Intel ifort 8.1/Intel MKL 7.2.
PowerPC G5
Dual 2.3GHz
Intel Xeon
Dual 3.4GHz
AMD Opteron
Dual 250 (2.4GHz)
Elapsed time in minutes—shorter bars are better
0 36 72 108 144 180 216 252 288 324 360
blastn
hmmer-no-nr-1
blastn-nt
hmmer-no-nr-2
blastx
hmmer-no-nr-3
tblastx
hmmer-with-nr
Bioinformatics Benchmark System (BBSv3): Dual Processor Summary
Testing conducted by Apple in January 2005 using preproduction Xserve G5 systems. All systems were configured with
4GB of RAM. Test results based on the Bioinformatics Benchmark System (BBSv3) at http://www.scalableinformatics.com/
metadot/index.pl?iid=2190 using Jan 1, 2005 FASTA databases and NCBI BLAST version 2.2.10 available from
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/executables and HMMER version 2.3.2 available from http://hmmer.wustl.edu.