[Gate-users] Parallel simulations and hardware specifications

Matthieu Dondey m.dondey at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 10:46:15 CEST 2015


Dear Alex,

Thank you very much for this precious thread.

I didn't fully understand "Once we finally set MT mode it can be integrated
into official Gate repository to run, for instance, in an Intel Xeon Phi
card without further requirements."

What is the official Gate repository ? What you meant is that with the MT
mode set up, it is possible to fully use an Intel Xeon Phi card type by
using all its threads, with no need for a cluster architecture ?

Regards,

Matthieu

2015-04-10 19:08 GMT+02:00 Alex Vergara Gil <alexvergaragil at gmail.com>:

> Dear Matthieu
>
> You may want to read the thread "Adding G4MTRunManager support to
> Gate", on it we explain our progress to make Gate running in
> Multithread mode and you are also welcome to contribute to the git
> repository in https://github.com/BishopWolf/Gate. Once we finally set
> MT mode it can be integrated into official Gate repository to run, for
> instance, in an Intel Xeon Phi card without further requirements.
>
> Regards
> Alex
>
> 2015-04-10 10:01 GMT-04:00, Matthieu Dondey <m.dondey at gmail.com>:
> > ​​
> >
> > Dear Gaters,
> >
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > My first question is about methodology:
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > Lastly, I’ve read in the Users Guide:
> >
> > *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.*
> >
> >
> >
> > 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?
> >
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >
> > Matthieu
> >
>
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