Telemac Benchmark Test

I recently took an old desktop machine of mine and installed GeekoCFD which is an openSuse based distribution with a number of open-source CFD tools including OpenFOAM. I then downloaded and compiled TELEMAC v6p1. Since I last compiled TELEMAC, there is a new Python-based method which does not require Perl. The installation instructions can be found here and are fairly complete. My compilation only used the scalar version of Telemac and not the parallel version. I will be attempting to compile a parallel version in the near future.

I then ran a Telemac3d case to compare the Linux version against my Windows version. My windows machine is a laptop with an Intel Core i3-350M processor (dual core running at 2.26 GHz) with 4 GB of DDR3 memory running 64 bit Windows 7. It was also compiled using the Intel Fortran compiler. My old desktop is  running openSuse 11.4 with the KDE desktop (very nice!). It has an Intel Core2 Duo E4500 running at 2.2 GHz and 1 GB of DDR memory. I ran a Telemac3D case and it took 2hrs and 32 minutes on my old desktop and 1 hour on my laptop.

Interesting the difference in the run time difference, as both machines are running dual core processors at nearly the same clock speed - however the newer i3 must be more optimized. The other large difference is that the Linux only has 1GB of memory and also is using the gFortran compiler.

My next experiment will be to try using Amazon EC2 and sign out a high CPU server, with the eventual goal of being able to cluster a number of instances in the cloud.