PC GAMESS/Firefly-related discussion club

Learn how to ask questions correctly

Slawomir Janicki
slawomir.janicki@comcast.net

I also had good luck with a mixed CPU cluster (P4, Core 2 Duo) for Firefly under WinXP. After spending some time with different versions of MPI, the Deino MPI worked the best wtih our corporate network security. There were up to 60 cores in the cluster, all cores had 2 GB RAM (i.e. 4 GB on Core 2 Duo) and a hard disk assigned to it. With dynamic load balancing I didn't see any performance loss on the faster CPUs. The network was Gigabit Ethernet using just the built-in ports in very cheap office PCs.

After the initial setup (all system updates from M$, Deino MPI, resolving conflicts on PCs with dual Ethernet cards) the cluster functioned almost without a glitch (one hard drive died and had to be replaced). I had >90% CPU usage over six months 24/7. Outside of that HD incident the only time the cluster went down was when we lost power.

Slawomir

On Tue Aug 18 '09 2:11pm, Igor Polyakov wrote
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>Hi,

>Actually I've had a similar case - several old p4+ 1 rather powerful core2 and i should say that in my case such cluster was working but was not a good idea because of significant differences in performance between the nodes so first of all you should consider if you really need such a dual-computer cluster for parallel runs.
>You are writing about <> but actually i would recommend you to read the manual on howto properly ask questions. First of all you didn't specify your hardware and software properly, 2nd you didn't describe any particular problem, just "it doesn't work in general" which is cool but pointless to discuss. And 3rd - you really need to understand that PC GAMESS and GAMESS US are not the same programs and their issues should be adressed in different forums - here we discuss only PC GAMESS (Firefly) and not GAMESS US.

>The very general guide for PC GAMESS should be something like:
>1. Verify that both computers work without system halts, blue screens of death or some other bug due to hardware or software installed.
>2 ... they have the same operational system installed, they have the same latest PC GAMESS distributions installed.
>3.... pc gamess runs in parralel separately on each of your nodes.
>4.... network connection between nodes works ok.
>5. Choose the main node and run PC GAMESS in parallel using all cores of both nodes. For the instructions on howto you should reffer to the specific manual depending on your operational system and chosen MPI.

>Best luck, Igor.
>
>
>On Sat Aug 15 '09 7:42pm, aleksandr wrote
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>>two computers having been linked together (with a gygabite channel) are to be used for PC/US GAMESS calculations. While one of them is equipped with Intel (2 core) CPU the another is represented by AMD (2 core) technologies. Both computers are being operated by MS Windows.
>>The problem we face is the impossibility of successful GAMESS run on both computers as one network-connected cluster (to get every damn processor unit in action).  We need yer assistance - every advice would be useful except from "read this FAQ'n manual". Guys, we'd really dug in the manual but we couldn't get nothin' really useful.
>>Since we ain't really experienced in parallel GAMESS computations we would ask you to write us sth like a short guide on how to launch GAMESS run on two computers connected together.