Thanks, Ross. I'm running a series of tests and will get back to
you with specific data.
Mike
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 08:50:36AM -0800, Ross Walker wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
> > Protein MD and minimization calculations run much faster
> > with MPI than with a single processor, as expected,
> > EXCEPT when I include water (solvateoct with TIP3PBOX).
> > In this case, the calculations actually run a little
> > slower compared to using a single processor.
> >
> > Is this a general problem when performing calculations
> > with many molecules, or have I misset (or have not used) a
> > necessary flag?
>
> This is a complicated issue that very much depends on your system setup and
> in particular the interconnect between your nodes. First of all if you are
> running GB or periodic PME calculations then you should compile and use
> PMEMD v9 which ships with Amber 9. This has been specifically optimized by
> Bob Duke to run efficiently in parallel.
>
> Secondly we really need to know more about your system. Not getting any
> speedup over a single processor is unusual. At the very least if you have a
> dual processor machine and you run a 2 processor job you should about a 1.9x
> speedup. The issue comes when communication must move out of the local node.
> If you have a very poor switch (such as a cheap 10GB switch which doesn't
> have a true non-blocking back plane) or even worse a hub at say only 100MBps
> speed then you will be lucky, on modern cpus, to see any speedup. This is
> especially true if you also use that same network for NFS traffic or other
> users of your cluster share it. If your cluster is bigger than a single
> switch such that you have multiple switches chained together and your
> queuing system doesn't ensure switch locality for your jobs then you might
> as well forget it. That said with a gigabit ethernet switch and single
> processor nodes you should at least be able to get to about 4 cpus or so.
>
> Ideally when building a cluster for running tightly integrated parallel
> calculations such as molecular dynamics you need a decent communication
> network such as myrinet or ideally infiniband. It also helps if you have all
> file system and management traffic routed over a different network to the
> mpi traffic.
>
> Note the problem is also a function of the speed of the individual cpus.
> Back in the day of 1GHz pentium 3's with a gigabit interconnect you could
> easily scale to between 8 or 16 cpus (depending on system size - typically
> the more atoms in your system the better scaling you get). This is because
> the ratio of compute speed to the interconnect speed was quite good. Now we
> have 3.8GHz machines with SSE2 that can do multiple floating point
> operations per clock cycle but people are still hooking them up with gigabit
> ethernet. Here the cpu is around 10 to 12 times quicker or more but the
> communication speed has remained the same - not good... Even worse they have
> 4 cpus per box and only one gigabit ethernet card which is like having only
> a 250MBps interconnect even before you take into account the extra overhead
> of packet collisions etc.
>
> So, hopefully the above helps a bit. It would be useful to know what the
> exact specs of your system are as well as the specs of the actual
> calculation you are trying to run and then we might be able to help out some
> more.
>
> All the best
> Ross
>
> /\
> \/
> |\oss Walker
>
> | HPC Consultant and Staff Scientist |
> | San Diego Supercomputer Center |
> | Tel: +1 858 822 0854 | EMail:- ross.rosswalker.co.uk |
> | http://www.rosswalker.co.uk | PGP Key available on request |
>
> Note: Electronic Mail is not secure, has no guarantee of delivery, may not
> be read every day, and should not be used for urgent or sensitive issues.
>
>
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--
*********************************
Michael F. Summers
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
and Howard Hughes Medical Institute
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
Phone: (410)-455-2527
FAX: (410)-455-1174
Email: summers.hhmi.umbc.edu
Web: www.hhmi.umbc.edu
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Received on Wed Jan 17 2007 - 06:08:25 PST
