2008/5/16 Gerry Creager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Has anyone seen a citation or reference for actually running WRF on a PS3 > cluster? I've got an itch to deploy a 16-PS3 cluster (gigabit intersinnect > <sigh>). That said, it's too much money to squander if there's not some > indication it'd show improvement over a "normal" cluster. > > gerry
Hi Gerry, I guess this is unlikely that PS3 would be that good for such a task while having only around 200MB available once the OS is running. In addition to the network card that is not really adapted for clustering, the most important aspect is how to get some performance improvement using the Cell ? Perhaps i'm just stating something obvious there, but a cell is nothing but a mere (rather old) PPC which comes with a bunch of coprocessors (SPEs), if you do not explicitely port the code so that it is offloaded on those coprocessors, there is no use in looking at the Cell. Perhaps there are ways to greatly improve WRF by offloading some compute intensive parts onto the coprocessors, but it *really* requires a lot of non-trivial work, and as far as i know (please correct me if i'm wrong) there is no such work done yet. However, i have seen that WRF 3.0 should support some "GPU accelerated microphysics" as an experimental feature; so perhaps some of those compute intensive parts can be rewrote to be explicitely offloaded on SPEs instead of GPUs ? Eventually, PS3 does not seem to fit clustering requirement given how small is its memory, and the poor network. And even if you were to use some Blades from IBM (like QS21, with high speed networks and decent memory size) there is still a big change that WRF needs a substancial effort to get the least benefit from running on the Cell. More generally, in case you did not see those before, Dongarra et al. wrote some interesting papers about PS3 clustering [1][2]. Regards, Cédric [1] A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3 - http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf [2] Limitations of the PlayStation 3 for High Performance Cluster Computing - http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawnspdf/lawn185.pdf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
