[Beowulf] Why one might want a bunch o' processors under your desk.

[Jim Lux]

From: "Greg Lindahl" <lindahl at pathscale.com>


> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:49:25PM -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
>
> > I suspect that I am not alone.  There are probably hundreds of people
who
> > have similar kinds of problems, and would be well served by a desktop or
> > personal supercomputer.
>
> Embarrassingly parallel computations should be embarrassingly easy to
> run on a cluster.
>
> Few clusters meet that standard.
>
> -- greg

Fascinatingly, the problem is not in starting all the jobs in parallel (that
was a script taking <30minutes to write). It's gathering and looking at the
data afterwards.

I suppose the real problem is in the user interface.  The code I'm running
has a long punched card heritage (yesirree, the input file is called a "NEC
deck", and the output file has carriage control characters in column 1), so
there's a wide variety of "front ends" to it to make the deck prep and
output viewing easier.

It's these prep and output viewer programs that need to be "cluster aware".