No experience running COAMPS but for WRF I think your proposed system
will work well. Memory bandwidth will play a role in preformance but
file IO will also. Infiniband _is_ worth the cost/effort.
I'd strongly recomment Luster/Gluster or GFS over NFS for this.
gerry
Anand Vaidya wrote:
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
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