[mesa-users] Using MESA on a 16 core machine

[Jeremy Sakstein]

Hi Nathan,

I run MESA here on the COSMOS super computer here in Cambridge and found it 
significantly faster. On 2 cores I can get a 1M from pre ms to WD in 1.5 
hours. The technician helped me a lot and we found that three cores is the 
most efficient (gaining only a small boost with 4).

Jeremy

On Jul 9 2011, Nathan Thompson wrote:

>Hello,
>
> My name is Nathan Thompson and I am a graduate student at Wichita State 
> University. I have been using MESA on my personal computer for about a 
> year to do computations. It is an Intel i7 860 machine (four cores) and 
> does well with the computations.
>
>Recently, I was given an account on a university computer in order to use
>that to do computations, a 16 core machine of which I am not 100% sure of
>the processor type, but I was assured that each of its cores were faster
>than my i7. However, when I ran the same model in MESA on both boxes, my PC
>did the computations twice as quickly as the university machine (and I had
>full use of all 16 cores). Both versions of MESA were compiled using
>gfortran.
>
> I know the MESA is "thread safe" as stated by the website, but 
> performance is noted to not increase with additional processors. Is there 
> an option that I need to set in MESA to activate the use of OpenMP for 
> multiple threads, or is this enabled "out of the box?" Also, is there a 
> way to limit the number of cores MESA has access to, so that I can test 
> to see if one of these cores is indeed faster than my i7?
>
>Thanks,
>Nathan Thompson
>Wichita State University
>