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Re: st: on 32/64-bit OS, CPU and Stata


From   James Muller <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: on 32/64-bit OS, CPU and Stata
Date   Fri, 29 Jul 2005 12:47:54 +1000

I guess this all gets very task-specific from here, depending on just how StataCorp have coded and built the different Statas. Also back to the OS kernel and its memory handling.

No idea what computation was involved in Joe West's do file, but perhaps Stata uses an optimized linear algebra library and Joe's do file involves lots of unoptimized calculations that aren't relying on linear algebra (19 mins doesn't sound like OLS).

...an unknowable mystery of the black box that is Stata, alas.

Cheers Alan

James


Alan Riley wrote:


I have one more comment to make on the speed of a 32-bit version of
Stata running on a 64-bit box vs. a 64-bit version of Stata running
on that same box.

I just did a quick 'silly' speed comparison. I generated two
variables containing 500,000 uniformly-distributed random numbers
each. I then sorted each variable. Finally I performed a linear
regression of one variable against the other. I ran each
commands multiple times and took an average timing.

This was done on a box running 64-bit Windows with a 1.4 GHz
AMD Opteron 240 processor and 1 GB of RAM.

The timings for 32-bit Stata on this box were

sort: 2.00 seconds
regress: .88 seconds

The timings for 64-bit Stata were

sort: 1.65 seconds
regress: .80 seconds


These timings are just a quick example which backs up what we have
already observed in our testing of Stata on various platforms. The
64-bit version of Stata outperforms the 32-bit version of Stata on a
64-bit box. Users wishing to push the edge of both speed and memory
are served very well with the current crop of 64-bit machines
available to them running a 64-bit version of Stata.


--Alan
([email protected])
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