AMD-PhenomII-1075_GTX470 NAMD-CUDA performance

From: Francesco Pietra (chiendarret_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 06 2011 - 02:54:52 CDT

Hello:

I have assembled a gaming machine with

Gigabyte GA890FXA-UD5
AMD PhenomII 1075T (3.0 GHz)
2xGTX-470
AMD Edition 1280MB GDDRV DX11 DUAL DVI / MINI HDMI SLI ATX
2x 1TB HD software RAID1
16 GB RAM DDR3 1600 MHz
Debian amd64 whyzee
NAMD_CVS-2011-06-04_Linux-x86_64-CUDA.tar.gz
No X server (ssh to machines with X server)

In my .bashrc:

NAMD_HOME=/usr/local/namd-cuda_4Jun2010nb
PATH=$PATH:$NAMD_HOME/bin/namd2; export NAMD_HOME PATH
PATH="/usr/local/namd-cuda_4Jun2010nb/bin:$PATH"; export PATH

if [ "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ]; then
     export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/namd-cuda_4Jun2010nb
else
     export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/namd-cuda_4Jun2010nb"

I lauched a RAMD rrn on a >200,000-atoms system with

charmrun $NAMD_HOME/bin/namd2 ++local +p6 +idepoll ++verbose
filename.conf 2>&1 | tee filename.log

It runs fine, approximately (by judging from "The last velocity output
at each ten-steps writing) ten times faster than a 8-CPU shared-mem
machine with dual-opteron 2.2 GHz.

I did nothing as to indicating the GTX-470 to use. Can both be used?
Is that the same (in terms of performance) using the nvidia-provided
cuda driver or the one available with the OS (Debian)?. Sorry for the
last two naive questions, perhaps resulting from the stress of the
enterprise. I assume that "nvidia-smi" is of no use for these graphic
cards.

Thanks a lot for advice

francesco pietra

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