This week, I have repeatedly discussed the same topic with many peers: What is the first step in starting a new project? Like … a PhD project. For me, it\u2019s about lowering the barriers that prevent beginning the research in the first place. It is all about setting up the right environment, which I call “infrastructure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes, my infrastructure gets disrupted, which slows me down. For example, my new laptop was a major annoyance for some months already. The fan was running at 100% RPM constantly after a software update. It made me worry instead of focusing on the work. Finally, this Saturday morning, I managed to fix it. I am not sure which solution worked \u2013 perhaps it was “fan control” \u2013 but now I can calmly work in silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, while troubleshooting, I learned more about my CPU and GPU setup. Interestingly, my laptop has two types of CPUs (performance and efficient), totalling 10 cores and 12 threads. I added commands for GPAW Python to run my DFT calculations on 4 and 8 threads accordingly. Yes, I enjoy running tests on my laptop before syncing them via Git and running them on an HPC. Also, I have finally set up the second build-in SSD to store large amounts of data. Hurray!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
alias gw8=\"taskset -c 4-11 mpirun --use-hwthread-cpus -np 8 --bind-to core python\"\nalias gw4=\"taskset -c 0-3 mpirun --use-hwthread-cpus -np 4 --bind-to core python\"<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nCalculations run twice faster in 4 performance threads than in 8 efficiency ones!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Feels so good when an infrastructure works for you (and not the other way around).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
P.S. The problem returned in a while. This time I installed ProcessLasso to set CPU affinity of most of the processes to energy efficient CPUs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week, I have repeatedly discussed the same topic with many peers: What is the first step in starting a new project? Like … a PhD project. For me, it\u2019s about lowering the barriers that prevent beginning the research in the first place. It is all about setting up the right environment, which I call… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,6],"tags":[53,31],"class_list":["post-953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-know-how","category-management","tag-gpaw","tag-hpc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=953"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1023,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/doublelayer.eu\/vilab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}