Today I introduced a much-needed feature to #GPUSPH.Our code supports multi-GPU and even multi-node, so in general if you have a large simulation you'll want to distribute it over all your GPUs using our internal support for it.However, in some cases, you need to run a battery of simulations and your problem size isn't large enough to justify the use of more than a couple of GPUs for each simulation.In this case, rather than running the simulations in your set serially (one after the other) using all GPUs for each, you'll want to run them in parallel, potentially even each on a single GPUs.The idea is to find the next avaialble (set of) GPU(s) and launch a simulation on them while there are still available sets, then wait until a “slot” frees up and start the new one(s) as slots get freed.Until now, we've been doing this manually by partitioning the set of simulations to do and start them in different shells.There is actually a very powerful tool to achieve this on the command, line, GNU Parallel. As with all powerful tools, however, this is somewhat cumbersome to configure to get the intended result. And after Doing It Right™ one must remember the invocation magic …So today I found some time to write a wrapper around GNU Parallel that basically (1) enumerates the available GPUs and (2) appends the appropriate --device command-line option to the invocation of GPUSPH, based on the slot number.#GPGPU #ParallelComputing #DistributedComputing #GNUParallel
