[Beowulf] Question on COAMPS, WRF and NHM

[Gerry Creager]

No experience running COAMPS but for WRF I think your proposed system 
will work well.  Memory bandwidth will play a role in preformance but 
file IO will also.  Infiniband _is_ worth the cost/effort.

I'd strongly recomment Luster/Gluster or GFS over NFS for this.

gerry

Anand Vaidya wrote:
> We are in the process of acquiring a new cluster for running weather modelling 
> software viz. NRL COAMPS, WRF and NHM (Japan)
> 
> We are currently running COAMPS on a Cluster of 50+ GigE and dual socket DC 
> Opterons, NFS, CentOS4, RAM size=1GB/core, the performance seems to be 
> limited by I/O (network I/O primarily). The performance flattens out at about 
> 32CPU.
> 
> Looking at the budget, current hardware availability, we have narrowed down to 
> dual socket Intel Quad Cores, with 2GB/core and DDR infiniband, and CentOS 
> 5.x, OpenMPI 1.2.x, SGE 6.x (Or maybe we will buy faster D-DC AMDs)
> 
> We did enquire with the organizations regarding suitability of these, they 
> could only offer limited help (understandably, the orgs may not be running 
> the configs we intend to buy)
> 
> I do understand that factors such as grid size etc play a role. I am right now 
> looking at gross factors before getting into actual test runs with different 
> configs.
> 
> I would like to to whether any users of the aforementioned software can help 
> answer the following questions:
> 
> - Does memory bandwidth (STREAMS?) have a significant impact? (Intel shared 
> bus -vs- AMD's dedicated interconnect), since QCs worsen the shared bus 
> loading
> 
> - Is infiniband worth it? (NRL seems to think it does enhance performance), 
> however no additional details are available.
> 
> - Is a parallel filesystem (eg: Lustre, GPFS, GFS) vs NFS
> 
> Regards
> Anand
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-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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