The core wars, begun they have

This week at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) several vendors are showing the latest in multi-core fashion -- the quad-core Xeon. Dubbed the Clovertown, this quad-core beastie is mentioned as part of Intel's new Core™ Microarchitecture". In particular, Appro is demonstrating a 1U server with two quad-core Clovertown processors. That is a total of eight cores in a standard rack-mount enclosure. I happen to know that they also have two of these systems connected via a Mellanox infiniband HCA and they are running the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite under Linux on all 16 cores. Rumor also has it that the monkey who set up the demo is running GKrellM on both nodes and 16 little windows show busy little cores. "What about numbers?, you ask. Stay tuned, real numbers for real cluster applications will be available in November at SC06

And, by the way, hypothetically speaking, if a certain Cluster Monkey happened to have these two nodes for a few more weeks, what would you like to see him run on it? (add your suggestion as a comment) That is, of course, hypothetically speaking.