[Beowulf] Re: energy costs and poor grad students

[Prentice Bisbal]

Mark Kosmowski wrote:

> I think I have come to a compromise that can keep me in business.
> Until I have a better understanding of the software and am ready for
> production runs, I'll stick to a small system that can be run on one
> node and leave the other two powered down.  I've also applied for an
> adjunt instructor position at a local college for some extra cash and
> good experience.  When I'm ready for production runs I can either just
> bite the bullet and pay the electricity bill or seek computer time
> elsewhere.

Mark,

For MPI testing/debugging, you can create a few virtual machine on one
node using VWware or Xen. VMWare is free, unless you want all the bells
and whistles.

This would be lousy performance for production runs, but would be great
for debugging MPI problems in your code, and save you energy. Of course,
this wouldn't help with hardware optimizations.

--
Prentice