The ABINIT Users Mailing List ( CLOSED )

[Nicola Marzari <marzari@mit.edu>]

Also, make sure you really need quad-cores. I've tested other plane-wave
electronic structure codes, and never found a case when the quad cores
were justified, for the marginal increase of performance compared to two 
cores - you usually saturate the memory bus very quickly, even with one 
core.

This is even more relevant when you factor in the true costs of air
conditioning and electricity.

                                nicola


Xiulin Ruan wrote:
> Thanks a lot for the information. Also, what is the proper amount of memory
> per core? Is 4GB good enough?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Xiulin
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Anglade Pierre-Matthieu [mailto:anglade@gmail.com]
> > Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 3:41 PM
> > To: forum@abinit.org
> > Subject: Re: [abinit-forum] computer cluster for parallel computing
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Two partial answers for your question:
> > - I have never done any benchmarking but infiniband works very well
> > for Abinit on "lemaitre" the super computer of the CISM
> > - You will find a detailed performance analysis by Torsten Hoefler
> > with two different kinds of interconnection here :
> > www.unixer.de/publications/img/hoefler-sfb05.pdf
> > This might be usefull for your decision.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > PMA
> >
> > On 8/17/07, Xiulin Ruan <ruan@purdue.edu> wrote:
> > > Dear all,
> > >
> > > We are building a computer cluster to run abinit in the parallel mode.
> > We
> > > are gonna have two or four nodes, and each node will be dual-processor,
> > > quad-core. We wonder if the high speed InfiniBand connection is worthy
> > to
> > > have. Our current jobs include calculating band structure and optical
> > > properties of carbon nanotubes and TiO2. Any suggestions?
> > >
> > > Many thanks,
> > >
> > > Xiulin


--
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Prof Nicola Marzari   Department of Materials Science and Engineering
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