*** For details on how to be removed from this list visit the ***
*** CCP4 home page http://www.ccp4.ac.uk ***
> As an off-list question, what programs, can take advantage of a multiprocessor
> server?
My experience with running crystallographic programs on a linux cluster,
is that for most of the time you treat the calculations as being
'embarrassingly parallel' by submitting multiple, independent (and, thus,
non-parallel) jobs on individual nodes. Individual jobs will not run any
faster (unless threaded), but on the whole, you get a nice linear
scale-up. I believe that part of the reason that crystallographic programs
have not been parallelised, is that the most common crystallographic
calculation, the FFT, does not scale-up very well, especially on clusters
with slow interconnects (I doubt that even gigabit ethernet can offer a
significant scale-up for small- or medium-sized transforms).
Nicholas
--
Dr Nicholas M. Glykos, Department of Molecular
Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace,
Dimitras 19, 68100 Alexandroupolis, Greece, Fax ++302551030613
Tel ++302551030620 (77620), http://www.mbg.duth.gr/~glykos/
