[Beowulf] first cluster

[Rahul Nabar]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Gus Correa <gus at ldeo.columbia.edu> wrote:
> Consider disk for:
>
> A) swap space (say, if the user programs are large,
> or you can't buy a lot of RAM, etc);

Out of curiosity, is there the possibility of running a "swapless"
compute-node? I mean most HPC nodes already have fairly generous RAM
and once swapping to disk starts performance is degraded (severely?).
Are there non-problem scenarios where one does desire swapping to
disks?

> D) Most current node chassis have hot-swappable disks, not hard to replace,
> in case of failure.

Hot-swappable disks are great on head nodes but on compute-nodes
whenever I hear "redundant" or "hot swappable", I see it as an
inefficiency. Or a excessive feature that could be traded off for a
cost saving. (of course, sometimes hands are tied if the server comes
with that feature "standard") What do others think?

-- 
Rahul