[gmx-users] Gromacs performance on virtual servers

[Elton Carvalho]

Dear Gromacs Users,

My former university is focusing on cloud computing instead of
physical servers, so research groups are now expected to buy virtual
servers from the university coloud instead of buying their own
clusters.

The current setup employs Xeon E7- 2870 servers and there is an
university-wide virtual cluster with 50 virtual servers each with 10
CPUs.

Does anyone here have information on gromacs performance on this kind
of infrastructure? Should I expect big issues?

One thing that comes to mind is that the CPUs may not necessarily be
in the same physical server, rack, or even datacenter (their plan is
to decentralize the colocation), so network latency may be higher than
the traditional setup, which may affect scaling. Does this argument
make sense or am I missing something on cloud management 101?

Cheers.
-- 
Elton Carvalho
Departamento de Física
Universidade Federal do Paraná