My setup is (or I should say was now as I no longer have access to the hardware) was an 8 way HP Xeon based system (3.something GHz), 4GB RAM. I was testing with the beta 1 version of the software, I haven't managed to upgrade yet.
I found several things which affected the scalability of what I was trying to do: - The size of the task - bigger definitely worked better, as the executors would spend less time transferring data back - The size of the data sent to the executors, and the complexity of that data - quite a lot of time could be spent serializing data if I sent lots of really complex classes across; sending simpler data types meant that less time was spent in the reflection code and more time doing work. I ended up sending back and forth simple float arrays and this worked extremely well - Memory - the system would start to page if the tasks took up lots of memory. - Network saturation - this wasn't a problem for me but it could be if you have many executors sending data back and forth. Note that one problem in the beta (not sure if it has been fixed in v1) is that the alchemi console doesn't really work when you have a multiple CPU machine on the grid, so to check on performance you really need to run up perfmon on each of the servers you are using. One very useful tool I found when doing all this was the CLR profiler from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=86CE6052-D7F4-4AEB -9B7A-94635BEEBDDA&displaylang=en) Adrian -----Original Message----- From: Luis Cota [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 6 January 2006 12:44 PM To: Jonathan Mitchem; Adrian O' Neill Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Alchemi-developers] Multiple Executors on One Machine Adrian, Can you share more details about your setup? I have two quad-processor machines running Windows Server, I believe they are 3.6ghz Xeon, but I am not positive on the name, just the clock speed. When I launch a single executor and run a test with a single executor, I get 25% usage, although work appears to be distributed across all four processors. When I run multiple executors, overall time of execution appears to drop. I'd appreciate some information regarding the type of application you were working with as well. It is not clear to me how this would affect the ability of multiple executors to operate well on a MP machine. - Luis -----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Mitchem [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 7:31 PM To: Adrian O' Neill Cc: Luis Cota; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Alchemi-developers] Multiple Executors on One Machine How does it depend on the application? What makes one application work "better" on that configuration than another? And for that matter, what's been your experience with several small tasks versus few large tasks? Jonathan On 1/5/06, Adrian O' Neill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > In one word yes - I have seen amazing increases in processor power when > multiple executors are used in multiprocessor machines - my testing was on 8 > way machines, but I'm sure 4 proc machines would produce the same results. > It all depends on the application. > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Luis Cota > Sent: 4 January 2006 11:40 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [Alchemi-developers] Multiple Executors on One Machine > > > > Is there any benefit to using multiple executors on a single machine? I > have been doing a few informal tests with a quad-processor machine and > multiple executors (1-4). If anything, it appears that there is a speed > impediment when using the executor app in this way. Have any of you found > otherwise? > > > > - Luis ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv37&alloc_id865&op=click _______________________________________________ Alchemi-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alchemi-developers
