installing openquake - questions about hardware

[C Beauval]

Dear developers,

I have questions dealing with the installation+run of openquake.
I'd like to know:
- will openquake be more efficient if installed on a linux machine with Ubuntu 12.04, rather than through a VBox (e.g. on a mac).
If these two options are possible, which one ensures that the program can be more stable / faster (assuming that the two machines have the same characteristics).
- is it reasonable to try to install OpenQuake on Debian 7 ?
The servers of my university are all with Debian. If I want to use these machines this is my only option.

I have seen this information on your website ('Hardware Suggestions'):
"More serious calculations would be better handled by a single server with a hardware RAID support: our "hope" server is a Dell® PowerEdge™ R420 with 12 cores (2 x Intel® Xeon™ E5-2430) 64GB of RAM and 4x2TB disks in a RAID 10 configuration and a hardware RAID controller (Dell® PERC H710). "
=> if running the calculations at country scale (e.g. 1000km x 1000km) and with a reasonable logic tree size, these 4x2TB disks are not required?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Céline Beauval

[Daniele Viganò]

Dear Céline,

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 6:13:44 PM UTC+2, C Beauval wrote:

Dear developers,

I have questions dealing with the installation+run of openquake.
I'd like to know:
- will openquake be more efficient if installed on a linux machine with Ubuntu 12.04, rather than through a VBox (e.g. on a mac).

Yes, much more efficient. VirtualBox on Mac is not so fast, also because Mac OS X eats lot of the system resources available. Sadly MacOS X doesn't support more efficient (free) virtualization technologies, like LXC and KVM.

 

If these two options are possible, which one ensures that the program can be more stable / faster (assuming that the two machines have the same characteristics).
- is it reasonable to try to install OpenQuake on Debian 7 ?

OpenQuake is not supported on Debian 7 since it provides software packages which are too old for OpenQuake. You can compile the missing pieces from sources but it's a big job and the result cannot be guaranteed 'a priori'.

There's a way to run OpenQuake on Debian 7 using LXC (https://github.com/gem/oq-engine/wiki/Deploy-the-OpenQuake-Engine-Nightly-using-LXC), a very light and fast virtualization technology. But, if it's possible, using directly Ubuntu 12.04 it's always the best choice. 

 

The servers of my university are all with Debian. If I want to use these machines this is my only option.

In this case you can have a try with LXC, but you'll need to ask your IT to install the LXC userland tools (apt-get install lxc - the core is already present in the Linux kernel) and to configure the network. We are already providing an OpenQuake image for LXC with Ubuntu 12.04 and OQ configured (see the wiki link above).

 

I have seen this information on your website ('Hardware Suggestions'):
"More serious calculations would be better handled by a single server with a hardware RAID support: our "hope" server is a Dell® PowerEdge™ R420 with 12 cores (2 x Intel® Xeon™ E5-2430) 64GB of RAM and 4x2TB disks in a RAID 10 configuration and a hardware RAID controller (Dell® PERC H710). "
=> if running the calculations at country scale (e.g. 1000km x 1000km) and with a reasonable logic tree size, these 4x2TB disks are not required?

No, for hazard calculation a little space is required, usually less than 1TB is fairly enough. Speed and a failure-tollerant configuration are more important: i.e. with 4x2TB drives in a RAID10 configuration (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels#RAID_1.2B0) you will have only 4TB (2*4/2) usable but 1.5x more speed and you can sustain a drive failure without a service interruption and without loosing any data. But the quantity of required space for hazard calcs is usually less; results can be moved to external drives, backup storages, tapes....

If you need more details or any further help don't hesitate to ask.

Best,
Daniele