Re: AW: Regarding NAMD and MD simulations

From: Joel Moniz (jram802_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 08 2014 - 22:17:19 CDT

Thank you very much, Mr. Geist. Yours sincerely, Joel On Monday, 7 July 2014, 13:20, Norman Geist <norman.geist_at_uni-greifswald.de> wrote:   Von:owner-namd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-namd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] Im Auftrag von Joel Moniz Gesendet: Montag, 7. Juli 2014 08:42 An: namd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu Betreff: namd-l: Regarding NAMD and MD simulations   Hello everyone.   I'm using NAMD for benchmarking a GPU cluster, and I don't have any experience with molecular dynamic simulations.I had a few doubts regarding NAMD, as well as regarding molecular dynamics:    Not the best base to carry out benchmarks, as it relies also on understanding what the code is doing.   1. Regarding the Linux-x86_64 and the Linux-x86_64-TCP versions, I have noticed better performance of the former, UDP version when compared to the TCP version on a Gigabit Ethernet network with 4 nodes on it. Is this expected?   Of course, as TCP has time consuming safety protocols which UDP have not. The required integrity checks are implemented in the charm++. Please notice that Gigabit is mostly insufficient for a GPU cluster.   2. Is there anyway that I could specify which GPU devices I want to use on each individual node when using the ibverbs-CUDA-smp distribution, like I can specify the number of CPUs per node with the ++cpus parameter in the nodelist file? Right now, I can only specify one +devices parameter, which seems to affect all the nodes, and a +devices next to each node of the nodelist seems to have no effect.   No. You need to hack the code to do that. I’ve done it so I could provide you a patch. Which means you have to recompile.   3. What does the stepspercycle parameter represent? I read that this represents the number of timesteps in a cycle, and each cycle represents the number of timesteps between pairlist generations and atom reassignments, but what exactly are pairlist generations and atom reassignments?   The periodic simulation cell is departed into patches (box slices) to depart the work (parallelization). As the atoms move, they may change the patches. But, the patches are build with parameters that do allow to not update these patches every simulation step, only every stepspercycle. So it is not expected that a atom changes the patch within 20 timesteps or get into the interaction cutoff distance to an atom which is not considered by the pairlists already.   4. Would the stmv example be representative of a typical MD simulation run (for example,  in terms of number of particles)? Where could I find other example simulations?   Its quite large. Another example for small to medium sized is “apoa1”.   5. Would the performance of a simulation vary significantly across simulations (provided parameters like numsteps, timestep, stepspercycle, etc., as well as the number of particles, remains constant)?   No, if same compute power is used.   6. What are the most frequently used values (or ranges) for numsteps, timestep and stepspercycle (though I realise that this would definitely depend on the application)?   None of them should be changed for benchmarks but you may want to use   Command line switches to namd2:   +ignoresharing   In namd script:   Fullelectfrequency 4; #in any case   Twoawayx yes; #if it brings speed Twoawayy yes; #if twoawayx brought speed and this brings speed   I'm extremely sorry if these doubts are a little too basic, but I have not been able to find any information regarding these doubts, and have no experience in molecular dynamics.   Thanking you, Joel ________________________________ Diese E-Mail ist frei von Viren und Malware, denn der avast! Antivirus Schutz ist aktiv.

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