use of quad core computers

George Magklaras georgios at biotek.uio.no
Thu Jan 15 16:02:56 UTC 2009


Rocks is a good distro, based on the redhat distro, although a separate 
one. The RHEL 5 OS is OK with quad core procs. How does it make use of 
them depends on the problem. If your problem is trivially parallel (its 
data set can be broken down into discrete chuncks), then you can run 
each chunk in a processor making use of CPU affinity (man taskset).

If your problem requires real parallelization, then yes, you need to 
install things like MPI. As far as I know, you are right. MPI does not 
come with RHEL, but you can easily download and compile it. We are using 
this one with RHEL 4, 5 and Fedora boxes:
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpich2/downloads/index.php?s=downloads

So, your investigators need to tell you a little bit more about the task 
at hand. The beauty of platforms like ROCKS is that they have all these 
things pre-setup for you. The bad thing is that you might need to 
install from scratch overwriting RHEL, if virtualization won't do the 
trick in your box(es).

-- 
--
George Magklaras BSc Hons MPhil
RHCE:805008309135525

Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX-Linux Systems Administrator
EMBnet Technical Management Board
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://folk.uio.no/georgios

Tel: +47-22840535

--


Margaret Doll wrote:
> How does the RedHat operating system make use of quad core computers?
> 
> I believe that MPI does not come with RedHat.  If my investigators 
> wanted to run/test parallel jobs on the quad core computer, would I have 
> to install something like Rocks with RedHat?






More information about the redhat-list mailing list