Best computational speed for dollar.

Question

I'm running some simulations from home, but I need more speed.  I was wondering how  to best spend my money.   I'm using Open source Fortran on a Mac which is about six years old.  If I buy the Intel Fortran compiler for about $600, that might increase my speed by a factor of 2 or more.  Alternatively, I could invest in a new computer.  If I buy a PC then I might get more computational bang for my buck.  We have occasional brief power outages here in Oregon, so I was thinking a laptop has a battery and might get me through many of these outages, but do laptops provide as much computational speed per dollar spent.  Does anyone have advise?

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Answer 1

The answer will probably depend on the nature of your simulations. For example, if you simulations can be easily parallelized then the biggest speedup will probably come from running on many cores simultaneously. Note that whether one compiler is faster than another depends on the specific problem as well. See https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/ifc-gfortran.html

Comments

@superbee  Thanks for the link to the bench mark  page. I'm astonished that the intel compiler is only clearly superior to the gfortran open source on one category, and slightly better on two categories.