[Beowulf] Green Cluster?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 01:31:27PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> So probably you don't want to turn off the nodes automatically, you
> want to turn them *off*. If your cluster is half idle, why bother
> turning it on at all?

Some people have clusters used for undergraduate instruction. So
they're very busy before assignments are due, and not so busy during
the rest of the time. That's only one of many reasons someone might
intentionally have idle nodes.

BTW, there are many solutions to remote power management. The most
common one I've seen deployed is "intelligent" PDUs, although this is
pretty expensive, $100 per node. Cheaper methods include X10, IPMI,
and Wake on Lan.

-- greg