[Beowulf] Can one Infiniband net support MPI and a parallel filesystem?

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Mark Hahn" <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> I would be embarassed to have less than 90%.  perhaps
> 70% would make sense for a cluster dedicated to a small
> or narrowly-defined group. 

Also depends on external criteria too.

For instance we have to try to balance usage between
the 8 different universities who are partners in VPAC,
and they have hugely varying usage profiles. 

So we are not given the luxury of just letting the scheduler
completely reorder queued jobs for backfill and we have
to impose limits on number of CPUs per user and institute
as well as using fair share to count in prioritising
jobs.

We could get a higher utilisation if we gave carte blanche
to the handful of users who queue hundreds of single CPU
jobs each and had them backfill every gap, but then we'd get
hammered by the members on the board (quite rightly) for
not giving others a look in. :-)

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency