<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(32,18,77)"></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(32,18,77)">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Dear Gaters,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">We expect
to soon have some funds in our lab to buy a simulation workstation and one of
its purposes will be Gate Monte Carlo simulations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">I’ve tried
to gather what the important hardware specifications are but I’d like to have advice
from people who are already performing parallel simulations on multi-thread
workstation or clusters.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">My first
question is about methodology:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">To split a
simulation into several jobs when using a multi-core computer, is the process
the same as the one described in the Users guide - Parallel Computing -> How
to use Gate on a cluster?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Next, is it
really beneficial to use GPU + CPU instead of CPUs alone? Is the Nvidia CUDA
technology well adapted to Gate simulations and what are its benefits and
downsides?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Lastly, I’ve
read in the Users Guide: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left;line-height:normal" align="left"><i><font><span lang="EN-US">In planning
simulation time, it is important to be aware that Gate simulations currently
seem to benefit only from the addition of physical CPUs. A computer with 8
hyper-threaded physical CPU cores (16 logical CPUs) will have the same
computational efficiency if 8 processes are run simultaneously as it would with
16 simultaneous processes.</span></font></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Can someone
confirm and explain why it is impossible to use logical threads with Gate (“seem
to benefit” doesn’t seem realy categorical)? Is it an issue which will be fixed
in next versions of GATE? Is it a Geant4 specific problem? Or is it possible to
exploit logical threads on Geant4?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br><span style lang="EN-US"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Any help
will be greatly appreciated and I'd be very grateful about any other advice on hardware specifications (RAM usage, important spec of processors, benefit of a SSD, etc.) <br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Cheers,<br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style lang="EN-US">Matthieu</span></p>
</div></div>