On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, Francesco Riboli wrote: > we are planning to buy cluster of computers to perform extensive > numerical simulations. In order to choose the best system for meep, we > need to know for which type of architecture Meep is optimized. It is > better to have one node with multiprocessors and multicore or to > distribute the calculus on diverse node of the cluster? Many Thanks
It's important to have a fast interconnect between the processors. We normally either run Meep on a shared-memory system (e.g. 4-core Intel processors) or on a high-end supercomputer with a fast interconnect (e.g. Infiniband or Myrinet). For these systems, we've gotten pretty good (within a factor of two of linear) speedup, going up to a couple hundred processors for large problems. It's possible that gigabit ethernet may be sufficient for a large enough problem, but I can't recall benchmarking this myself. Perhaps someone else on here has some numbers. Steven _______________________________________________ meep-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://ab-initio.mit.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/meep-discuss
