PC GAMESS-related discussion club

Alexei Popov
alexei.a.popov@gmail.com

1. for two-node clusters, the quality of switch in not very critical. Any gigabit ethernet switch will work (the only exception are very cheap switches).

2. You need to use Gigabit ethernet adapters for your cluster.

3. The quality of motherboard is important as PC GAMESS is a serious stress for system and hardware. The quality of memory is important as well.

4. Try to use a separate HDD for each CPU core.

5. Direct runs will scale very good, and with separate HDDs conventional will do as well.

6. Good cooling system and case are important.

7. Blackford chipset is for servers. It is expensive and requires expensive Xeon processors and FBDIMMs.

Hope this helps.

Alexei Popov




On Mon Sep 17 '07, Zoran Matovic wrote
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>Wish to ask You: I am planning to build up small cluster of two machines with quadripole processors.
>
>Please have a look the configuration of two identical machines given bellow and help me to decide where different solutions exists:
>
>Processor: Intel LGA Core2Quad Q6600 2.4GHz (258 Euro)
>
>MB: MSI S775 P35 NEO2-FR 1333MHz 8GB 4xDDRII 1066MHz CF 7.1ch HDA GLAN (112 Euro)
>or
>Asus S775 P5K Intel P35 DDR2 1066 800 667 1xPCI-E x16 CrossFire X16+X4 SATA II (113 Euro)
>or
>Asus S775 P5KC Intel P35 DDR2 or DDR3 1xPCI-E SATA II*4  (135 Euro)
>HDD: Samsung 160GB 7200rpm SATAII NCQ 8.9ms (54 Euro)
>
>Case+power: Chieftec BH-02B-B-B 400W (94 Euro)
>or
>Spire SP-3005B Middle ATX Case Black PSU 420W (31 Euro)
>
>Video card: MSI nVidia NX6200TC-TD128E PCI-E 350MHz 500MHz 512MB DDRII 64Bit DirectX 9.0 (34 Euro)(must purchase 'cause the card is not intergarted in mb)
>
>RAM: Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 CL5 DIMM (Kit of 2) (80.5) (How much memory you propose for each machine?)
>
>DVD RW: Samsung DVD-ROM 16x48x beige (1300) ili Pioneer DVDRW DVR112D Black (28 Euro)
>
>all above doubled
>
>Switch: Asus GigaX 1024P 24x10 100; 2x10 100 1000 (109)
>or
>D-Link DGS-1005D E 5-port Gigabit Unmanaged Switch  (31.5 Euro)
>or
>D-Link DGS-1008D E 8-Port 10 100 1000Mbps Gigabit Unmanaged Switch (46 Euro)
>
>
>Should I expect aproximately linear speed up with eight cores as I observed on other clusters but with separated single processors? (I saw the pages with jobs run in parallel on core 2 quad but didn't get real answer from the data and those comp. experim.s were runs on one quad core machine: what would be expected with two machines with quad core processor?). What about new Intel P35 chipset: have you pcgamess experience with this new chipset and if so whats the difference between p35 and Blackford one given in performance page (this one is not present on pc market in my country)?
>
>Have a nice day.
>
>Wishes
>Zoran Matovic