[gmx-users] More Athlon talk

[Erik Lindahl]

>
Hi,

> I am concerned about Athlons XP overheating and I am suggesting to 
> others
> at least PIV northwood.  Xeon would be great, but only for those who 
> can
> afford it.

I've tested our dual Athlons rather carefully, and we have never, ever, 
had a problem with single-cpu jobs (but we use ECC memory).

The CPU test-heat-program is also running great, so I think we can 
safely rule out the possibility of a bug in Gromacs, since Pentiums 
execute exactly the same code without any problems.

That leaves the SMP stuff; perhaps we can try to debug it together :-)

First, is anybody having RANDOM (i.e. not deterministic) problems when 
not running in parallel? In that case we should probably have a look at 
the linux kernel mailing list and see if people are aware of it, or if 
there is a bugfix. Justin's problem sounds like it's overheating or 
something, I'm rather thinking of minor quirks like getting slightly 
different trajectories when you run a simulation twice (not complete 
crashes).

If/When those things work well we can start bugging the LAM authors or 
compare LAM with MPICH.

I'm sitting at Stanford right now (AMD headquarters is 20 min away), so 
if we really find out a problem that is more or less reproducible I 
could try to get a technical contact with AMD.

Cheers,

Erik