[gmx-users] Poor stupid Athlons...

[Justin MacCallum]

Hi all,

we have been having problems with our Athlon machines (dual MP2200+'s)
crashing roughly once every several weeks. As other people have
reported, the crash brings down the entire machine, OS and all,
requiring a hard reset.

We have tried everything to get them to work, including moving them to a
different building that has a better machine room!

On Erik's advice, I recompiled gromacs with a hacked version of
detectcpu.c. I edited the file to skip the check for SSE, forcing the
use of 3DNow.

I'm happy to report that after a little more than 2 weeks of solid use,
we have not had a single crash on 16 machines. Normally I would have
expected a least 2 or 3 machines to be down.

I'll report back in a couple more weeks, but so far it looks like this
fix works (for us at least).

Justin