[Beowulf] mem consumption strategy for HPC apps?

[Lombard, David N]

From: Greg Lindahl on Friday, April 15, 2005 11:15 AM
>To: beowulf at beowulf.org
>Subject: Re: [Beowulf] mem consumption strategy for HPC apps?
>
>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.

Agreed.

>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.

Even then you're point is still well taken, i.e., extra code in the form
of an out-of-core solver was written to deal with the matrix size v.
memory size, it is certainly not relying on paging.

-- 
David N. Lombard
 
My comments represent my opinions, not those of Intel Corporation.