On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Mark A Saper
Interestingly, although each node has 8 processors, the OMIT region jobs seems to only use one processor!
The individual jobs spawned by AutoBuild are single-processor; the queueing system may have spread them out over as many nodes as possible, but they could just as well run on all 8 processors of one node, as long as enough memory is available. Interestingly when phenix.refine jobs are run on my Macbook Pro, the
operating system is savvy enough to spread it over 2 processors.
phenix.refine itself isn't actually using both processors at once, though - I'm not sure how Python and the OS work internally, but only one Python or C++ thread is running at a time, and it may switch between processors. (I've noticed the same behavior on my Macs.) If you use the GUI, that will be running in a separate process, but it doesn't do very much other than process messages from phenix.refine, plus whatever is required to display the model and maps (if you watch them in Coot, etc.). -Nat