Power-managment of slave nodes

Kyle Sheumaker ksheumaker at advancedclustering.com
Tue Mar 6 12:09:53 PST 2001


I have played with wake-on-lan and not had a lot of luck.  It is a special
packet (http://www.scyld.com/expert/wake-on-lan.html), but some motherboards
/ nics just don't seem to want to "wake."

They aren't cheap but I would suggest something like the APC masterswitch,
it's a network controllable power switch
(http://www.apc.com/products/masterswitch/index.cfm).  I've used them before
their pretty cool, web, telnet, and SNMP controllable.

-- Kyle


----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Marsden" <marsden at scripps.edu>
To: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 11:39 AM
Subject: Power-managment of slave nodes


> Dear all,
>
>  I look after a 96 processor, 48 node, Pentium III linux cluster. The
> owners have just received their first electricity bill for the machine and
> unsuprisingly have had a nasty shock! They are now desperate to find ways
> to keep the bill as low as possible.
>
>  One solution put forward has been to have nodes shut themselves down
> using APM when not in use. Then when a node is needed for a job, it could
> be switched back on via wake-on-LAN on the ethernet card. I see a number
of
> problems associated with this:
>
> 1) APM is not supported under Linux 2.2 for SMP. However I believe that it
>    is for 2.4 - can anyone comment on this?
> 2) Wake-on-LAN - I'm not 100% clear on whether this listens for a specific
>    packet or whether it will just fire the machine up if a packet comes
>    along with the NICs MAC address. If the later is the case I think we
>    are snookered since we use PBS as the queueing system which I believe
>    sends out packets to query nodes every now and then.
>
>  Before I spend more time delving deeper into these problems, has anyone
> ever attempted to try to do all of this? If so, what are the perils and
> pitfalls? Is this a completely crazy idea?
>
> Thanks
>
> Brian.
>
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Brian Marsden          Email: marsden at scripps.edu
>  TSRI, San Diego, USA.  Phone: +1 858 784 8698  Fax: +1 858 784 8299
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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