Swap file in scyld

Sean Dilda agrajag at scyld.com
Wed May 23 12:22:52 PDT 2001


On Wed, 23 May 2001, Josh Puckett (EUS) wrote:

> Thank you very much. That worked, I just switched $RAMDISK to /dev/hd1/, voila.
> One more question to show my stupidity. I started on this project because the linux guru of the department told me that it would speed up compile of software we are doing all the time, after delving into this further I have come to realize that this probably isn't possible. Can it be done?
> thanks again

Unfortunately, 'Will a beowulf speed things up for me?' isn't a simple
question and depends a lot on what you're doing.  Even with compiling,
there are some situations where it will help and others where it won't.

If your compiles are such that you have a lot of files that can be
compiled in parallel (as opposed to having to wait for others to be
compiled before they can be compiled) then its possible that a beowulf
cluster will help speed things up.  Also, if your compile is such that
your main slow down is the processor time to compile the files and not
the I/O time to read the files, then there's even more of a chance that
a beowulf cluster will help speed things up.

The tricky part is getting make (or something like it) to use a cluster
for compiling.  I have heard of companies that use clusters for
compiling like that, but unfortunately I know of no publiclly available
verion of make (or something similar) that can be setup to use a cluster
for compiling.   If anyone knows of one, I'd love to hear about it.


Jag
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20010523/c4d7c6d1/attachment.sig>


More information about the Beowulf mailing list