Load Balancing w/ Dual Processor System

[Laura]

I have a dual CPU system with Windows 2000. The resources
are allocated to 'system idle' instead of being allocated
to programs that are waiting for processor resources to
run. (eg. my app gets 0-1% while 'system idle' has 49-50%)
I understand what the system idle process is, but i don't
understand why the system is idle when it has two
applications waiting for resources. I have tried setting
affinity, and setting priority of processes to high,
nothing works.

 

[Chris Knapp]

Are you absolutely sure that the applications are waiting on the CPU? The
biggest bottleneck in any modern machine is I/O. Be it disk or memory or
network. Post back with some specifics and someone may have more info.

 

[Laura]

Here are some specifics:
I am running 2 simulations written in FORTRAN and each
simulation is assigned to one processor. The simulation is
very processor intensive because it involves several
matrices calculations of size (2000,2000). The data used
in the simulation is all generated by the random number
generator and stored in a matrix. The only i/o is when the
program writes out several output files at the end of the
run. I have run the simulation on a single 2400+ processor
and it takes about 4.5h. The same executable is used on
the dual processor system (2 x 2400+ AMD Athlons). One
simulation takes about 4.5 hours and the other simulation,
running simultaneously on the other processor, takes about
18+ hours, sometimes up to 36+ hours. The o/s is Windows
2000. Can anyone help me?

 

[Chris Knapp]

What kind of motherboard are you using? How much RAM and what kind? I have
seen similar problems when the RAM is insufficient and/or not fast enough to
feed data to the processor.

 

[Guest]

I have a Tyan Tiger Dual AMD motherboard, 1 gig of DDR
Ram. Since the one simulation is running fast on one
processor, I think the problem is not i/o, but the process
just isn't getting assigned the cpu time it should be. I
have heard there might be a patch to fix this, but i can't
find any on MS or Tyan web sites.

 

[Chris Knapp]

Sorry to keep harping on the IO issue.

Do you have the most current BIOS for your mobo?
Is this your system? http://www.tyan.com/support/html/b_s2460.html

If you run each application individually, will they run on the processor
that they have an affinity to?

 

[Laura]

Yup, that's my system! I will try updating the BIOS and
hopefully that will help. Thanks for your help =)
Laura