[Beowulf] Beowulf on Demand

[Reuti]

Hi,

Am 28.05.2007 um 18:43 schrieb Juan Camilo Hernandez:

> Hi list
>
> we are starting a project about an assembly of a Beowilf cluster
> between several research groups at the University where I am studying,
>
> We have had some prblems, but mainly for the quantity of money that
> every group have to contribute for administrative and manteniance
> cost.
>
> The idea that we have is that every gruop contribute with a quantity
> of money depending of their use of the flops in the cluster, someting
> as "computacion bajo demanda"
>
> I would like to ask you: Do you think is this one, the best option to
> mesure the cluster user  use to be able to proced to charge to every
> user?
>
> Could you let me knoe which software can I use to be able to carry on
> this kinf of control?
>
> Do you have any suggest or recommendation?

do you intend to use a queuingsystem for batch operation, e.g. SUN  
GridEngine? http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

This way you could balance on the one hand the amount of computing  
time each group/user will get at a certain point of time in the  
cluster, and OTOH also get some accouting data - either by the  
granted nodes/slots in walltime or the real consumed CPU time by user/ 
group/project. The latter is useful, in case you oversubscribe the  
nodes, as some parallel programs are not doing parallel work all the  
time, and this way the idling time on such nodes can still be used  
for some kind of "serial background job".

-- Reuti