[gmx-developers] 2018-beta1: Performance of membrane simulations

Jochen Hub jhub at gwdg.de
Fri Dec 1 22:33:59 CET 2017


Dear developers,

I started a thread in the user list yesterday (and Szilard already gave 
a quick answer) but I felt this point is relevant for the developers list.

We did some benchmarks with the 2018-beta1 with PME on the GPU - overall 
fantastic (!!) - we just don't understand the performance of lipid 
membrane simulations (Slipids or Charmm36, with UB potentials). They 
contain roughly 50% lipid, 50% water atoms. Please see here:

http://cmb.bio.uni-goettingen.de/bench.pdf

As you see in the linked PDF, the Slipid simulations are limited by the 
CPU up to 10 (!) quite strong Xeon cores, when using a GTX 1080. Szilard 
pointed out that is is probably due to bonded UB interactions - however, 
they make only 0.2% of the Flops, see the log output pasted below, for 
ntomp=4 or 10 (for 128 Slipids system with 1nm cutoff). The 
Flops-Summary is nearly the same for ntomp=4 or 10, so only the ntomp=4 
is shown below.

In contrast, protein simulations (whether membrane protein or purely in 
water) behave as one hopes, showing that we can buy a cheap CPU when 
doing PME on the GPU.

So my question is: Is this expected? Is this really due to Urey-Bradley? 
Or maybe due to Constraints? In case that UB is limiting, are there any 
plans to port this also onto the GPU in the future?

This has also impact on hardware: Depending on whether you run protein 
or membrane simulation, you need to buy different hardware.

Many thanks for any input, and many thanks again for the fabulous work 
on 2018!

Jochen


  Computing:                               M-Number         M-Flops  % Flops
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Pair Search distance check             151.929968        1367.370     0.0
  NxN Ewald Elec. + LJ [F]            157598.160192    10401478.573    97.2
  NxN Ewald Elec. + LJ [V&F]            1623.781504      173744.621     1.6
  1,4 nonbonded interactions             200.360064       18032.406     0.2
  Shift-X                                  1.553664           9.322     0.0
  Propers                                246.449280       56436.885     0.5
  Impropers                                1.280256         266.293     0.0
  Virial                                   7.657759         137.840     0.0
  Stop-CM                                  1.553664          15.537     0.0
  P-Coupling                               7.646464          45.879     0.0
  Calc-Ekin                               15.262464         412.087     0.0
  Lincs                                   74.894976        4493.699     0.0
  Lincs-Mat                             1736.027136        6944.109     0.1
  Constraint-V                           226.605312        1812.842     0.0
  Constraint-Vir                           7.614336         182.744     0.0
  Settle                                  25.605120        8270.454     0.1
  Urey-Bradley                           144.668928       26474.414     0.2
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Total                                                10700125.072   100.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


      R E A L   C Y C L E   A N D   T I M E   A C C O U N T I N G

On 1 MPI rank, each using 4 OpenMP threads

  Computing:          Num   Num      Call    Wall time         Giga-Cycles
                      Ranks Threads  Count      (s)         total sum    %
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Neighbor search        1    4         51       0.260          2.284   2.4
  Launch GPU ops.        1    4      10002       0.591          5.191   5.4
  Force                  1    4       5001       7.314         64.211  67.1
  Wait PME GPU gather    1    4       5001       0.071          0.626   0.7
  Reduce GPU PME F       1    4       5001       0.078          0.684   0.7
  Wait GPU NB local      1    4       5001       0.017          0.151   0.2
  NB X/F buffer ops.     1    4       9951       0.321          2.822   2.9
  Write traj.            1    4          2       0.117          1.026   1.1
  Update                 1    4       5001       0.199          1.749   1.8
  Constraints            1    4       5001       1.853         16.270  17.0
  Rest                                           0.085          0.743   0.8
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Total                                         10.907         95.757 100.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************************
****** 10 Open MP threads ******
********************************

On 1 MPI rank, each using 10 OpenMP threads

  Computing:          Num   Num      Call    Wall time         Giga-Cycles
                      Ranks Threads  Count      (s)         total sum    %
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Neighbor search        1   10         51       0.120          2.625   2.3
  Launch GPU ops.        1   10      10002       0.580         12.731  11.3
  Force                  1   10       5001       2.999         65.828  58.4
  Wait PME GPU gather    1   10       5001       0.066          1.459   1.3
  Reduce GPU PME F       1   10       5001       0.045          0.980   0.9
  Wait GPU NB local      1   10       5001       0.014          0.308   0.3
  NB X/F buffer ops.     1   10       9951       0.157          3.453   3.1
  Write traj.            1   10          2       0.147          3.224   2.9
  Update                 1   10       5001       0.140          3.067   2.7
  Constraints            1   10       5001       0.814         17.867  15.9
  Rest                                           0.053          1.161   1.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Total                                          5.135        112.703 100.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------



-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Dr. Jochen Hub
Computational Molecular Biophysics Group
Institute for Microbiology and Genetics
Georg-August-University of Göttingen
Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 11, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
Phone: +49-551-39-14189
http://cmb.bio.uni-goettingen.de/
---------------------------------------------------


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