[mesa-users] OpenMP vs. MPI

[Richard Townsend]

Hi Brian —

For running a single instance of MESA, it’s certainly true that a single workstation can sometimes outperform a single node of a cluster. However:

*) You mention using an iMac; although the clock speed is certainly higher than for the nodes in your cluster, it only has 4 cores (assuming you have the recent slim 3.4 Ghz iMac, from late 2013). I would be surprised if it were faster than a cluster node with 16 cores.

*) If you’re running a grid of models, and each model within the grid can be calculated independently of the others, then the cluster can still offer you significant speedups. Simply run different models *concurrently* on different nodes of the cluster.

cheers,

Rich

On Sep 24, 2014, at 3:43 PM, Brian Jackson <decaelus at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 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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