Silvia Giuliani wrote:
Dear All

Has anybody tried version 4.0.5 on an IBM Power6 (4.7Ghz) cluster?
We have installed the program with the following configure options (using fftw we installed separately):

./configure --with-fft=fftw2 --enable-mpi --enable-float CC=mpcc_r F77=mpxlf_r CXX=mpCC_r CFLAGS="-O3 -qarch=pwr6 -qtune=pwr6 -qcpluscmt"

It compiles and works but the performance is poor compared to our Opteron Cluster (2.6Ghz) For example with 8 procs for a small protein in water we get 5.8ns/+day compared to 9.6 ns/day on the Linux cluster, which is a bit disappointing. Since there alot of compiler options to play with we would be grateful if somebody who has already found a good set would share them with us.

If this processor does not support PowerPC Altivec, then the reason is straightforward. GROMACS gets its speed from optimized non-bonded interaction kernels, and your machine doesn't have any written for it. You can see in the .log file whether generic or optimized kernels are being used. Optimized kernels exist for x86s, so they're fast.

Given the above assumptions, your GROMACS installation will be using generic kernels written in C. You should certainly try the --enable-fortran configure flag to see if the equivalent in FORTRAN is better optimized by the compiler.

You can try -O4 or -O5, but these tend to have little utility for GROMACS.

Mark
_______________________________________________
gmx-users mailing list    gmx-users@gromacs.org
http://lists.gromacs.org/mailman/listinfo/gmx-users
Please search the archive at http://www.gromacs.org/search before posting!
Please don't post (un)subscribe requests to the list. Use the www interface or send it to gmx-users-requ...@gromacs.org.
Can't post? Read http://www.gromacs.org/mailing_lists/users.php

Reply via email to