| 5:06:28 PM PDT - Fri, May 22nd 2015 |
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If your jobs lead to large files then fast disks may well be worthwhile. I would say profile first. See how much data is cumulatively written/read during a trial job. See how much more wall clock time than CPU time your job takes. The surplus wall clock time is mostly down to waiting on IO. If you have slow disks then your disk-heavy jobs run slower but if you don't have enough RAM, larger coupled cluster jobs can't run at all. In theory, direct methods that just recompute integrals on the fly are faster than disk-caching methods if you have a high enough ratio of CPU power to disk speed. In practice I have never seen direct methods run faster, even when I was using slow spinning disks in laptops.
The Intel Parallel Studio includes a Fortran compiler despite the misleading way it's named on some of their pages. If you qualify for that you should be fine. It has been some years since I looked at Intel's free software. I had thought that the academic, open source, and student offerings were basically the same last I looked. Academic currently appears more restricted than the others. For such a small compute cluster I don't think that buying Intel's software will provide a bigger speed boost than buying hardware, if you can't get a free license.
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