casino on gpu?

General discussion of the Cambridge quantum Monte Carlo code CASINO; how to install and setup; how to use it; what it does; applications.
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Mauro_Causa
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:41 pm

casino on gpu?

Post by Mauro_Causa »

Has anybody ever installed CASINO on system that uses a Graphycal Processing Unit (GPU)?
QMC seems the right calculation for GPUs.

thank you
Mike Towler
Posts: 239
Joined: Thu May 30, 2013 11:03 pm
Location: Florence
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Re: casino on gpu?

Post by Mike Towler »

Hi Mauro,

I had a go at this last year using OpenACC and the PGI compiler. It was very frustrating as the compiler was full of stupid bugs, and I had to spend some considerable time negotiating with the PGI people to get them fixed. When I was finally able to get a working GPU-enabled CASINO executable it turned out to be about 27 times slower on 1 CPU and 1 GPU than on a CPU alone. The conclusion was that CASINO would have to be rewritten from the ground up to re-order various loops and so on before the GPU-ization would work, and there was still no guarantee that you would get much benefit. As the modular structure of CASINO makes this very difficult to do, well, frankly I couldn't be bothered. In the end, I decided to wait for the technology and the software to improve; some other efforts continue in the background but don't expect anything useful anytime soon..

There is a more extended discussion of this in the talk I gave at 'QMC in the Apuan Alps' last year, which you can find in my slides on the conference web page: http://www.vallico.net/tti/qmcitaa_12

Best wishes,
Mike
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