[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Buccaneer for Hire.]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Stuart Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com>
> To: Beowulf List <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 7:41:17 PM
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] commercial clusters
> 
> actually, their IO requirements are not that great.  Certainly the  
> systems that I run have far greater io capacity for a much smaller  
> cpu count than the seismic machines.
>
     I too work for one of those Houston companies and in our cluster performance absolutely does count.  The way it is structured here, we compete with outside businesses for BU jobs, so we have to perform.  I like to use "bigger-faster-cheaper" as our slogan for production work.   And among our bottlenecks is network and nfs performance.   We push nfs so hard we have to tweak file systems to make it handle the work. Because right behind that job are tons of more jobs with people waiting get their jobs done so their projects can move forward.

     Our next generation software will absolutely beat the snot out of our existing storage (and I pride myself on performance). So with another 100TB coming in the next few months we are always configuring and testing.  I have taken a left turn for a bit to explore how using grid technology to increase our SLAs, but I will get back to exploring options to make our system more efficient. 

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