OrcaFlex benchmarking and hardware recommendations

Hardware recommendations

We are unable to make specific recommendations about what hardware is best to run OrcaFlex because the technology available changes very quickly. The current range of Intel processors perform better than those from AMD. Multi-core chips provide the best performance to price ratio at the current time. Other than that we simply recommend that you obtain the latest processor/chipset/memory in whatever family fits your other IT and purchasing requirements.

If you wish to make comparisons of performance when running OrcaFlex then we do provide a benchmark program. This can be used by you and your suppliers may use to determine the optimum machine to purchase.

OrcaFlex Benchmark program

The OrcaFlex benchmark program allows you to measure how fast machines are at performing OrcaFlex calculations.

The program is compiled from the same sources as OrcaFlex and runs a short dynamic simulation. The simulation is run 3 times and the reported result is the average time to run the 3 simulations. Thus lower scores mean the simulation completed more quickly and therefore correspond to a faster machine.

The latest version is 2.1c (released August 2008). Results are not directly comparable with older versions of the benchmark program. If you are comparing performance of two or more machines please ensure that you are using the same version of the benchmark program, preferably the latest version.

Downloading and running the OrcaFlex benchmark program

1. Download OrcaFlexSpeed.zip (2.0 MB).
2. Extract all the files from this zip file. We advise you to extract the files to some location on your network (see item 4).
3. To perform a benchmark double-click on speed.bat.
4. The program is a simple console program and it outputs results to the console. In addition it records results in a file called speed.log. It appends to this file so if you save the program to a network location then you will be able to record results for a number of different machines in one file.

Multi-threading

The benchmark program is capable of multi-threading. For a machine with multiple processors or multiple cores it first benchmarks the machine in single threaded mode and then performs multi-threaded benchmarks.