[gmx-users] tesla vs gtx

[Szilárd Páll]

Hi,

Teslas should be superior when it comes to reliability, but otherwise,
for Gromacs 4.6 GeForce cards are perfectly fine and no Tesla-specific
features will provide performance benefits. The only exception is
GPUDirect for InfiniBand which might not work with consumer boards --
, although I don't see why it wouldn't, except if it's simply disabled
in the driver.

Here are the reasons (based on the list on the page you provided):
- Faster Double Precision Performance - not needed;
- Faster Data Transfers to/from CPU (with full duplex PCI-E) - will
not help in 4.6;
- Direct GPU to GPU communication - will not be used in 4.6;
- Larger Memory Size	- not needed (simulation with millions of atoms
will run on a GeForce);
- Optimized for InfiniBand - not sure about it, but it might not work;
- Performance Drivers	 - simple solution: don't use Windows.

Cheers,
--
Szilárd



On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Andrzej Rzepiela
<Andrzej.Rzepiela at physik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> From the previous posts on the list I got the feeling that gtx are fine
> enough for gromacs calculations and  4 times more expensive teslas are
> actually  not necessary. However the hardware providers discourage us from
> using gtx in a small cluster. The number of reasons is listed on the
> website http://www.fluidyna.de/en/tesla_geforce .  For the future versions
> of parallel gromacs are the listed points ( in particular  faster data
> transfers to/from CPU, faster GPU-GPU communication and less memory errors
> on teslas) relevant ?
>
> Thank you for comments
>
> Andrzej
>
>
>
> --
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