FlamMap

Website: FlamMap

Another HPC application is fire behaviour mapping and analysis. FlamMap is used by several federal government organisations in the USA, and uses a terrain map combined with meteorological data to compute fire behaviour (likelihood, location, intensity and movement) over time.


With the small dataset benchmark configured with four fires per thread, the Xeon X5482 system completed the test in 220 seconds, while the Opteron 2382 system took 310 seconds. However, the Xeon W5580 system completed the test in just 130 seconds - an incredible 69 percent improvement over the Xeon X5482s. While resisting the temptation of making a pun around the phrase ‘setting the world on fire’, a pair of Xeon W5580s is clearly excellent at running complex simulations such as FlamMap.

LightWave 9.6

Website: LightWave 9.6

Another commonly used workstation application is Newtek LightWave, which was recently used in ‘Iron Man’ and the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ TV series. We used LightWave 9.6 to render a single frame of animation from the scene developed by 3D Speed Machine.


While the Xeon X5482s took 89 seconds to complete the frame, the Xeon W5580s took just 66 seconds, a 35 per cent improvement. Interestingly, the Opteron 2382s were slightly faster than the Xeon X5482s, completing the render in 85 seconds. However, this was the only test in which the Opteron system was faster than the Xeon X5482 PC.

Terragen 2

Website: Terragen 2
Planetside Software’s Terragen 2 is a highly realistic landscape generator; its images have been used as backdrops in films such as ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ and ‘Stealth’.


Despite the benchmark only using an 800 x 600 image, the Xeon W5580s took a lengthy ten minutes and 32 seconds to complete the render. In contrast, the Xeon X5482s took ten minutes and one second, while the Opteron 2382s took 13 minutes and 23 seconds. After further research, we discovered that the poor performance of the Xeon W5580s was due to Terragen 2 only having support for up to eight CPU cores.

To force Terragen 2 to use the physical instead of the logical cores of the W5580s, we ran the test with Hyper-Threading disabled in the BIOS. In this configuration, the Xeon W5580s took a far more respectable eight minutes and 43 seconds, a 15 percent improvement over the Xeon X5482s.