[mesa-users] OpenMP vs. MPI

[Brian Jackson]

Many thanks for the responses.

Brian

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Robert FARMER <rjfarmer at asu.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> There right that an individual job will be no faster on the cluster than on
> your local machine, in fact maybe slower depending on how many cores you can
> request for each run, if you can get all 16 cores on the same machine it
> should be faster than your desktop. Although i don't know how well mesa
> scales past 10 cores so being limited to at most 16 may not be an issue.
>
> But what you could do is run many mesa jobs simultaneously, each taking 1
> core each, so each job takes longer overall but a grid of mesa models will
> be quicker (depending on how busy your cluster is)
>
> There are guides here http://mesastar.org/tools-utilities/mesa-on-clusters
> from people running mesa on clusters
>
> Rob
>
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Bill Paxton <paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> > ---------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer
>> > Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports
>> > Are you Audit-Ready for PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance? Download White paper
>> > Comply to PCI DSS 3.0 Requirement 10 and 11.5 with EventLog Analyzer
>> >
>> > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=154622311&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > mesa-users mailing list
>> > mesa-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa-users
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Meet PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance Requirements with EventLog Analyzer
>> Achieve PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant Status with Out-of-the-box PCI DSS Reports
>> Are you Audit-Ready for PCI DSS 3.0 Compliance? Download White paper
>> Comply to PCI DSS 3.0 Requirement 10 and 11.5 with EventLog Analyzer
>>
>> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=154622311&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
>> _______________________________________________
>> mesa-users mailing list
>> mesa-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa-users
>
>