[gmx-users] GPU gets faster with more molecules in system

2011-01-24 Thread Christian Mötzing
Hi,

I compiled mdrun-gpu and tried some waterbox systems with different
atoms counts.

atoms  | GPU| CPU
2.400  | 1.015s | 774s
4.800  | 1.225s | 1.202s
9.600  | 1.142s | 1.353s
19.200 | 2.984s | 2.812s

Why does the system with 9.600 atoms finish faster than the one with
4.800? I tripple checked the simualtions and even GROMACs tells me that
the atom count in the system is like above. So I think no mistaken
there. A diff of md.log only shows differences in output values for each
step.

Is there any explanation for this behaviour?

Christian

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Re: [gmx-users] GPU gets faster with more molecules in system

2011-01-24 Thread Mark Abraham

On 25/01/2011 8:25 AM, Christian Mötzing wrote:

Hi,

I compiled mdrun-gpu and tried some waterbox systems with different
atoms counts.

atoms  | GPU| CPU
2.400  | 1.015s | 774s
4.800  | 1.225s | 1.202s
9.600  | 1.142s | 1.353s
19.200 | 2.984s | 2.812s

Why does the system with 9.600 atoms finish faster than the one with
4.800? I tripple checked the simualtions and even GROMACs tells me that
the atom count in the system is like above. So I think no mistaken
there. A diff of md.log only shows differences in output values for each
step.

Is there any explanation for this behaviour?


As a guess, the cost of overheads for molecular simulations tend to have 
a weaker dependence on system size than the cost of computation (or none 
at all). Only once the latter dominate the cost do you see scaling with 
system size.


I expect you'd see similar behaviour running systems with 64, 128, 256, 
512 atoms on 64 processors.


Mark
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