Dual Core Efficiency for Engineering Simulation Applications

With the event of multi-core processors the parallel execution of simulation applications has resulted in new problems and possibilities in resource usage in high performance computing (HPC). In this paper we have investigated the impact of execution of engineering applications utilizing one and two cores in an Intel Core 2 Duo based Linux cluster. In engineering industry the number of licenses puts practical and economical constraints on the maximum number of processes. Consequently the issue of how to distribute a given number of processes over the compute nodes in a HPC resource becomes very important. When distributing the application over multiple nodes we found that having N processes on N computer nodes, only using one core on each node, is significantly faster than running N processes on N cores in N/2 computer nodes. Only in one case out of 32 it was beneficial to use both cores. The “one compute node – one simulation process” approach gave an average cost efficiency increase of 16.5%, and for several sub-cases it is actually costbeneficial to run on more nodes than fewer, which decreases the overall run time