We are in the process of acquiring a new cluster for running weather modelling software viz. NRL COAMPS, WRF and NHM (Japan)
We are currently running COAMPS on a Cluster of 50+ GigE and dual socket DC Opterons, NFS, CentOS4, RAM size=1GB/core, the performance seems to be limited by I/O (network I/O primarily). The performance flattens out at about 32CPU. Looking at the budget, current hardware availability, we have narrowed down to dual socket Intel Quad Cores, with 2GB/core and DDR infiniband, and CentOS 5.x, OpenMPI 1.2.x, SGE 6.x (Or maybe we will buy faster D-DC AMDs) We did enquire with the organizations regarding suitability of these, they could only offer limited help (understandably, the orgs may not be running the configs we intend to buy) I do understand that factors such as grid size etc play a role. I am right now looking at gross factors before getting into actual test runs with different configs. I would like to to whether any users of the aforementioned software can help answer the following questions: - Does memory bandwidth (STREAMS?) have a significant impact? (Intel shared bus -vs- AMD's dedicated interconnect), since QCs worsen the shared bus loading - Is infiniband worth it? (NRL seems to think it does enhance performance), however no additional details are available. - Is a parallel filesystem (eg: Lustre, GPFS, GFS) vs NFS Regards Anand _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
