[Beowulf] Need Help...!

[Reuti]

Hi again,
 
> Thanks alot for the prompt reply. Right at the moment I am asked to
> purchased the following for my cluster:
> 
> 1) MPI/Pro by verari systems
> 2) PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit by Portland Group
 
> Purchasing 100 processes of MPI/Pro is really very expensive for me.
> Similarly, for my 100 processors I have to purchase 256 licences of
> PGI CDK because they offer licences in groups of 16/64/256 CPUs. Even
> if I purchase 256 licences for just 2 simultaneous counts, it costs me
> a lot...

is there a direct use of the cluster features of the PGI CDK? According to 
their websites it's just a combination of the compilers, MPICH and a part of 
OpenPBS. And OpenMP is also included in standard package of their compilers.

Is your main application to use the compilers for software development or to 
use the compiled programs?

So you could just buy one license of the normal compiler, download MPICH at 
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich and choose a queuing system (maybe 
OpenPBS or better) SGE from SUN at http://gridengine.sunsource.net , it's also 
free. In contrast to OpenPBS, you can kill the slave processes on the nodes 
nicely with SGE and it runs really stable.

Just test the performance with this combination, and you can add MPI/Pro later, 
after you tested the performance gain with a demo of it. Because the 
performance will also depend on the used network. I don't know the prices of 
MPI/pro, but maybe a second dedicaded network only for MPI communication is 
also an option and speed up the things (or Myrinet, Infiniband - this depends 
on the amount of MPI traffic your applications will generate).

Best greetings - Reuti