[Pw_forum] abysmal parallel performance of the CP code

[Alexander Shaposhnikov]

I hope you did not forget to set GOTO_NUM_THREADS=1 env. variable?

I usually have 2.5 - 3 speedup for CP on Dual DualCore Opteron Machine.
Gigabit network is really not fast enough for this kind of computations.
It has latencies 10 times worse than myrinet and infiniband networks. 

The result for the quad machine is strange. Should be faster. If
possible, provide your input file, i can test it on our DualCore boxes.

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 10:48 -0700, Konstantin Kudin wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
>  I've done some parallel benchmarks for the CP code so I thought I'd
> share them with the rest of the group. The system we have is a cluster
> of dual Opterons 2.0 Ghz with 1Gbit ethernet.
> 
>  I looked at 2 different measures of time, CPU time, and wall time
> computed as the difference between "This run was started" and "This run
> was terminated". By the way, such wall time could probably be printed
> by the code directly to be readily available.
> 
>  The system is a reasonably sized simulation cell with 20 CP
> (electronic+ionic) steps total.
> 
>  The compiler is IFC 9.0, GOTO library is for BLAS, and mpich 1.2.6
> used for the MPI. The CP version is the CVS from Aug. 20, 2005.
> 
>  What is crazy is that even for 2 cpus sitting in the same box there is
> lots of cpu time just lost somewhere. The strange thing is that the
> quad we have at 2.2 Ghz seems to lose just as much wall time as 2 duals
> talking across the network. And note how 4 cpus are barely better than
> 2x compared to single cpu performance if the wall clock time is
> considered.
> 
>  I know Nicola Marzari has done some parallel benchmarks, but I do not
> think that wall times were being paid attention to ...
> 
>  Kostya
> 
> P.S. Any suggestions what might be going on here?
> 
> 
> Ncpu	CPU time	Wall time
> 1	1h22m		1h24m
> 2	45m33.41s	57m13s
> 4	27m30.80s	44m21s
> 6	18m22.71s	43m18s
> 8	14m53.91s	45m56s
> 
> 4(quad) 37m18.56s	45m32s
> 
>  
> 
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