CKO



Implementation of MICOM for SMP Computers

Version: 2.7

This version of SCMICOM version is based on the physical model implemented in MICOM version 2.6. This means that this version of SCMICOM has the same limitations as MICOM 2.6. Most important, it is not suited for areas of the oceans near the north or south poles.

Introduction
SC-MICOM is a version of MICOM that has been restructured to take advantage of Shared-memory Multi Processor (SMP) machines and clusters of such machines. (SC stands for SMP Cluster.) The code runs efficiently on both Challenge and Origin 2000 hardware.

Download
You can download a 7.6 Mb gzipped tar file containing the source code of SC-MICOM, a user manual, and a set of data files from here: scmicom-2.7.tar.gz. This version has been tested on a parallel SGI64 computer.

Note that this implementation only runs on Silicon Graphics hardware and requires that the Message Passing Toolkit is installed on the computer. This toolkit is availabe from SGI.

Installation
To install the package you should create a directory SCMICOM and copy the downloaded file into it. After changing into the SCMICOM directory you can unpack the tar file with the command

gunzip -c scmicom-2.7.tar.gz | tar xvf - 
and type
make
to compile the micom and partit programs. When the build is finished, these executables are located in the SCMICOM/bin directory.

Configuration
Information on configuring the SC-MICOM program is avialable in the postscipt document doc/user_guide.ps.

Compilation
You can compile the program by typing the following command in the SCMICOM directory

make
All object files and executables can be removed by typing
make clean

Running
Performing a simulation with SC-MICOM involves two steps: First, the workload should be divided amongst a number of computers. This is done with the partit program. Hereafter, the simulation program itself, micom, can be started. You can perform a demo run of SC-MICOM by typing the command 'make demo'. The program requires about 36 Mb of memory to run. It completes in approximately 10 min on a Silicon Graphics Challenge SMP computer using four processors.

Performance Considerations
The actual performance improvement of SC-MICOM compared to the standard implementation of MICOM depends on many factors. To ensure a good performance, one should at least ensure that the number of processors allocated are really available while SC-MICOM is running. If this is not the case, a possibly severe loss in performance will occur. In fact, SC-MICOM might require several times more time to complete the simulation than the standard implementation MICOM.

Support
SC-MICOM is supported at the S1 level (see also the page on support levels). For more information about SC-MICOM, you can contact the author.


Camiel Severijns
Last modified: Thu Nov 4 14:37:22 CET


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