Why is the SMP client important, and why is the benchmark set at that level?
The purpose of the SMP client is twofold: to take advantage of the high-performance capabilities of recent multiprocessor systems and to help develop a simulation architecture that will become one of the dominant FAH computing paradigms as multi-core chips become an industry standard over the next several years. High-performance clients enable us to run types of calculations that would be impractical on our standard architecture–calculations that enhance our scientific capabilities, and your scientific contributions, significantly. High-performance clients often require more computing resources. SMP clients typically run on dedicated systems, 24 hours a day, and use more processing power, more disk space, more network resources, more system memory, etc. Also, a major part of the scientific benefit is dependent on rapid turnaround of work units; hence we assign short deadlines for SMP work units. To reward those contributors for donating resources beyond the typical CPU client, for com
