ScienceMark
One of the most important new entries in our test suite is Tim Wilkens' impressive ScienceMark. What is ScienceMark all about? Well, take a look at this description of the Primordia test, which is one component of ScienceMark:

This code solves for the Hartree-Fock ( Orbital Restricted, Spin-Restricted, and Un-Restricted ) of any atoms NON-RELATIVISTICALLY. It solves for the Radial components of the Atomic Orbitals

SOLUTION = R(r) * Ylm(theta,phi)

assuming the Spheical Orbitals are fixed. In the benchmark you are solving for the 33 orbital restricted solutions to R(r) on 4000 grid points. A rather daunting task.

Indeed. My head hurts already.

But you get the idea. ScienceMark is about serious physics equations, and in many ways such calculations are the real litmus test for a general-purpose microprocessor. If a processor can competently crunch through math problems about the fluid dynamics of liquid argon, it ought to be good at most things. If you want to know more about ScienceMark's individual tests, go here.

ScienceMark is unique because it runs a series of tests, then spits out a composite overall score, kind of like 3DMark. ScienceMark's creator, Tim Wilkens, was kind enough to help us out with our testing by supplying multiple versions of the test compiled with different compilers. The original ScienceMark 1.0 was compiled using Compaq's Visual Fortran (CVF). Tim has been working with Intel to get ScienceMark compiled and working with Intel's VTune compiler, which promises much better performance in some cases, especially with SSE2 on the Pentium 4. However, working with VTune hasn't been easy. Here's what Tim had to say about it:

Ask yourself if the Intel compiler is up to spec. I've found 2 bugs and 1 perf issue which have had to be rectified so as to make a fully functional ScienceMark binary optimized for the P4. In the process of fixing these issues I've recieved 4-5 compilers from Intel.. each successively more functional than the previous. Intel is really working hard on their compilers and their support staff has given me excellent assistance. They're a great bunch of people there. But for SSE2 to become widespread and prevalent throughout the hardware community, a compiler that's "robust" must be available.. and this is simply not the case. Yet.

I can't help but wonder.. how many applications have been released.. that are required to show the power of the "netburst" architecture of the P4 in 2001. I also wonder how many of these applications have been assembly optimized for the P4 without a second thought to optimizing for the Athlon. ScienceMark is an attempt to provide an unbiased guide to the developer as to the state of affairs in compiler development. The source has NO CPU SPECIFIC assembly instructions. It also is well optimized and achieves rather high throughput on the Athlon and PIII.

Nevertheless, Tim was able to supply us with some VTune-generated ScienceMark binaries for testing.

In all, we've tested four different ScienceMark executables: two each from CVF and VTune. It breaks down like this:

  • A version compiled with CVF and optimized for the Pentium III (and 4).
  • A version compiled with CVF and optimized for the Athlon.
  • A version compiled with Intel VTune and optimized for the Pentium 4.
  • A version compiled with Intel VTune and optimized for the Athlon.
Unfortunately, the VTune versions of ScienceMark wouldn't complete all the tests and produce an overall ScienceMark score. Tim did get it working just before we went to press, but there wasn't time to re-test everything. Instead, we've included VTune results in a couple of places, so you can compare them with the CVF results.

First, let's see how the different processors fared overall..

Just like a lot of our tests above, the Athlons come out ahead, but the 1.7GHz P4 is very closely matched to the 1.2GHz Athlon. Funny how that works.