AMBER Archive (2007)

Subject: Re: AMBER: Any experience on Dell two quad core system?

From: Andreas Svrcek-Seiler (svrci_at_tbi.univie.ac.at)
Date: Thu Aug 02 2007 - 23:18:42 CDT


Hi,
> We are going to buy the following DELL system to our group to run AMBER
> 9: Dell Precision Workstation 490n MiniTower, running in Red
> Hat Enterprise Linux WS v4. It has two Quad Core Intel Xeon Processor
> E5335 (2 GHz, 2X4MB L2, 1333). It is going to have 8 GB of RAM in it.
> I was wondering if any of you had any experience on running AMBER in this
> kind or similar system; particularly the efficiency of running sander.MPI.
> Is 8 GB of RAM enough, or can we get better speed by increasing the RAM to
> 16 GB?
No. If your system is so big that you need more than 8 GB of RAM, your job
would run unbearably slowly anyway.
Some time ago I tried the "one million atom" benchmark (see
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/utilities/) from the NAMD
developers on several nodes (using NAMD of course).
Each node had 4 GB of RAM and none started swapping ( =running out of RAM
and using the harddisk instead).

...just my 0.02$ and others might have a different opinion.

good luck
Andreas

P.S.: We're going to get just such a machine and I'm really looking
forward to benchmarking such an expensive toy :-)
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