[mesa-users] OpenMP vs. MPI

[Brian Jackson]

Dear MESA users,
I'm planning to run a grid of MESA calculations, and I was hoping to
use the cluster at my home institution to speed things up. However,
after getting MESA installed on the cluster, the IT folks here sent me
the following message (copy-pasted since I don't really understand the
issues involved):

"Spent some more time looking at how MESA functioned and it seems that
it utilizes the OpenMP library, rather than an MPI library. The issue
with this is programs that utilize OpenMP run on a shared memory
model, which means your MESA jobs would be limited to one node (16
cores). Because our cluster is focused on quantity of processors, the
speed of each individual processor is most likely not as high as those
on your workstation over there (2.0 GHz). This means you would likely
experience better results running MESA locally (and potentially
investing in a more powerful workstation if need be)."

So it sounds like running MESA on my iMac with a 3.4 GHz processor
might be faster than on the cluster. Any suggestions/work-arounds?

Thanks,
Brian

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Brian Jackson, Assistant Professor
Dept. of Physics
Boise State University
1910 University Drive
Boise ID 83725-1570

E-mail: bjackson at boisestate.edu
URL: http://www.astrojack.com
Phone: (208) 426-3723
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