The ABINIT Users Mailing List ( CLOSED )

["Xiulin Ruan" <ruan@purdue.edu>]

Thanks for the information. We tested quad-cores and we do find the
performance is no better than dual-cores. So we will go with dual-core
processors. One more question. It seems AMD processors have better
performance than Intel for abinit, right?

Thanks,

Xiulin
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicola Marzari [mailto:marzari@mit.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2007 2:50 PM
> To: forum@abinit.org
> Subject: Re: [abinit-forum] computer cluster for parallel computing
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof Nicola Marzari   Department of Materials Science and Engineering
> 13-5066   MIT   77 Massachusetts Avenue   Cambridge MA 02139-4307 USA
> tel 617.4522758 fax 2586534 marzari@mit.edu http://quasiamore.mit.edu