[me3840]

Hello folks

I'm trying to see if it's worth it to add additional machines or just get a larger machine with more CPUs to my small cluster. Right now I have a little hodgepodge of:

Machine 1: i7 920 @ 3.7GHz (4 cpus), 24GB of memory
Machine 2: 3570K @ 3.4GHz (4 cpus), 12GB of memory

Both machines are connected through a gigabit ethernet switch.

Basically I'm looking to see how much would be gained over adding additional machines over ethernet. I would like to run these tests:

2 core job, 2 on machine 1
2 core job, 2 on machine 2
2 core job, 1 cpu on each machine
4 core job, 2 cpus on each machine
8 core job, 4 cpus on each machine

OpenFOAM outputs the clockTime and executionTime at every timestep, but is there a way to have it report the time used during each part of the iteration?

Also how do I evaluate network lag/latency/usage?

Do these tests seem reasonable or is there a flaw someplace?