[Beowulf] What services do you run on your cluster nodes?

[Patrick Geoffray]

Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> from processing interrupts, or prevent your OS from properly switching
> to a high priority process following an interrupt, but SMM will and
> you can't get rid of it.

You can usually disable SMI, either through the BIOS or directly from 
the chipset. However, you will lose most thermal management (including 
over-temperature protection) and some chipsets require SMM to work 
around hardware bugs.

The 10-20 us you will lose to SMM every couple of minutes is not very 
high on the list for HPC, compared to daemons burning two orders of 
magnitude more cycles.

This is not yet real-time territory. You turn off what you can, and you 
deal with the rest. Ultimately, tightly coupled codes get what they deserve.

Patrick