[mesa-users] OpenMP vs. MPI

[Bill Paxton]

Hi Brian,

Your IT folks got it right.  MESA is designed to make use of OpenMP shared-memory parallelism.  The only value of the cluster will come if you want to run lots of MESA's doing separate jobs, such as in a population study or a study of the effects of different parameter values.  The cluster's many nodes aren't going to help on individual MESA runs.  For that, multicores help, at least for up to 8 cores or so (I have one workstation in my office with 12 cores and another with 20 -- the 1st an aged mac, the 2nd a new workstation from Microway).  So you might consider trading in your iMac for something with at least 4 cores and at least 8 MB of ram.  To anticipate your next question, GPU's aren't helpful. ;D   They are great for some things, but not for full stellar evolution, at least not in the way it is done in MESA.   

Hope that helps,
Bill



On Sep 24, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Brian Jackson 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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