[gmx-users] oscar , lam and beowulf

[Anton Feenstra]

Y U Sasidhar wrote:
> 1. Can someone comment on using oscar to set up a x86 based cluster to 
> run gromacs.
> I have 3 dual xeons and I want to cluster them.
> http://oscar.sourceforge.net/
> 2. Someone claimed that beowulf cluster scales much better with the 
> number of nodes than with mosix/lam based cluster. What is the 
> experience of users on this list ?

AFAIK, the only significant factor in gromacs scaling behaviour on a
cluster is the network hardware, e.g. 100M, 1G ethernet, or myrinet.

Still, for 3 dual Xeons with 100M ethernet on a switch, you should
get decent scaling simply with mpi (i.e., lam).

Finally, clustering is only useful if you have one single simulation
to run for a long time, otherwise you are better (and easier) off by
running several 2CPU simulations on your dual machines (also requires
mpi).


-- 
Groetjes,

Anton
  _____________ _______________________________________________________
|             |                                                       |
|  _   _  ___,| K. Anton Feenstra                                     |
| / \ / \'| | | Dept. of Pharmacochem. - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
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