another radical concept...Re: [Beowulf] Cooling vs HW replacement

[Jim Lux]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Lindahl" <lindahl at pathscale.com>
To: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 1:33 PM
Subject: Re: another radical concept...Re: [Beowulf] Cooling vs HW
replacement


> On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 12:52:50PM -0800, Jim Lux wrote:
>
> > There's also the prospect, not much explored in clusters, but certainly
used
> > in modern laptops, etc. of dynamically changing computation rate
according
> > to the environment.
>
> This is already done; the Pentium 4 dynamically freezes for 1
> microsecond at a time when it is too hot. I've also got some AMD
> Athlon boxes that run 10% slower after I've been running them hard.
>
> This is apparently controlled by the BIOS, though, so I don't think
> it's that configurable enough to be very useful. You could rig
> something up with a temperature sensor (perhaps lm_sensors) and
> cpufreq.
>
> -- greg

I was thinking about doing the load scheduling at a higher "cluster" level,
rather than at the micro "single processor" level... That way you could
manage thermal issues in a more "holistic" way.. (like also watching disk
drive temps, etc.)

Jim