Beowulf and variable cpus

[Troy Baer]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000 p.grimshaw at virgin.net wrote:
> Hi, I am new to Beowulf and have some questions,
> 
> 1. Does anyone know if I am able to run a beowulf cluster with
> different types of clients, i.e I have a load of pentium 100s
> and some p2 500s which I would like to use together. Is this
> possible?

Sure, it's definitely possible.  You may run into load balancing problems
if you have a parallel programs running on both fast and slow CPUs.  If
you use a batch system like PBS, you can create attributes for individual
nodes and use those to ask a homogeneous set of processors (or
heterogeneous, for that matter):

# ask PBS for 10 Pentium 100MHz nodes
#PBS -l nodes=10:p_100

# ask PBS for 6 Pentium II 500 MHz nodes
#PBS -l nodes=6:p2_500

# ask PBS for 10 Pentium 100s *and* 6 P2 500s
#PBS -l nodes=10:p_100+6:p2_500

I'd assume/hope you can do similar things in other resource managers and
batch systems, like LSF and DQS (although I've never tried either).

	--Troy
-- 
Troy Baer                       email:  troy at osc.edu
Science & Technology Support    phone:  614-292-9701
Ohio Supercomputer Center       web:  http://oscinfo.osc.edu