Parallel Ab initio quantum chemistry on pentium-pro networks
- Sandia National Lab., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
As the performance of inexpensive PCS approaches that of the fastest single processor supercomputers, high-end computing is increasingly dominated by massively parallel computers with hundreds or thousands of CPUs. Although such systems are essential for many applications, smaller parallel computers can achieve much lower price/performance ratios using commodity processors and interconnections. To investigate the feasibility of this approach for parallel quantum chemistry we have constructed a 56 processor parallel computer from fourteen 4-processor shared memory Pentium-Pro motherboards. These are interconnected by a 100 Mbit/sec. fast ethernet switch and each motherboard has 256 Mbytes of RAM and 1 Gbyte of disk. The system runs the LINUX operating system which supports symmetric multiprocessing on each four processor motherboard. Although some bottlenecks still exist in the inter-system communication, we have achieved very reasonable speedups running our massively parallel quantum chemistry program (MPQC).
- OSTI ID:
- 559983
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-970443--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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