[Beowulf] mem consumption strategy for HPC apps?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 08:59:34AM +0200, Toon Knapen wrote:

> Next we all know about 
> the famous performance-memory tradeoff which says that performance can 
> be improved by consuming more memory and vice versa.

No, I _don't_ know that one. Often you have to write extra code to
trade off memory for performance, or it takes so much memory that
there's practical no way to improve performance by using more memory.

In addition, it's fairly rare for HPC applications to use more memory
than a machine physically has. Perhaps you work in one of those rare
areas. One example I know of is NASTRAN, which solves a huge matrix
that often doesn't fit in memory. But there's no tradeoff involved,
either the matrix fits or it does not. Perhaps you were talking about
the quality of the solution?

-- greg