Subject: "Best" Multiprocessor Platf

From: "John Beckerle" <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Apr 1997 12:23:29 -0500

We are seriously considering investing in a multiprocessor compute server.
The candidates include the IBM SP2, SGI Origin2000, Sun Ultra HPC, DEC
Alphaserver and other similar machines.  We are probably looking at something
on the order of 8 processors and 2GB of memory, although expandability and
upgradability are important.  The system is supposed to serve a variety of
engineering and scientific high performance computing needs, not just
computational chemistry.

I would like to poll the collective experience of CCL as to what is the best
platform, and even more importantly, which platforms should be avoided for
computational chemistry applications.  I am interested in hearing about real
experience with software availability, incompatibilities, and performance
surprises (including effective use of parallelism), both good and bad.  We are
interested in the full range of computational chemistry applications including
SCF and MD. 

I would like to stress that I am looking for good and bad experiences with
effectively using any of these multiprocessor machines and the roadblocks
others have encountered.  I am not so interested in relatively minor
differences in performance of the individual CPUs, benchmarks, etc.  I want to
know if they can be used effectively without miracles.

I am already familiar with the extensive evaluation of workstation performance
by Martyn Guest, as well as Milan Hodoscek's comparison for parallel MD
speedups.

As I don't subscribe to CCL at this time, please respond directly to:
[email-masked]

I will summarize to the list if their is interest.

John Beckerle
Clemson University
[email-masked]