itaps-parallel reasons against part=mesh instance

[Mark Beall]

All,

I was thinking over the call we had on Monday, specifically about what  
arguments were made against part=mesh instance. The only really  
compelling argument I recall (and sorry if I don't remember others,  
that's why I'm writing this email) was Tim's example of the overhead  
in partitioning a mesh into 100,000 partitions with 8 elements each.

Well, it kind of struck me that Tim's example, while relevant in terms  
of the percentage of overhead isn't really that relevant in terms of  
total memory. The initial mesh there would be 800,000 elements, maybe  
a few hundred MB. Even with much more than 100% overhead, I could  
easily do that on my laptop. Given that I can buy a computer with 96  
GB of memory today for about $8000 (192 GB for $17000) ( a Dell 7500  
with 3rd party memory in case you're curious), you could add a couple  
zeros to the number of partitions for that mesh before it should  
become an issue for someone that will be running that simulation on a  
supercomputer costing a few hundred million dollars.

What were the other compelling arguments against part=mesh instance?

mark