[Beowulf] Powersave on Beowulf nodes

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Huw Lynes" <lynesh at cardiff.ac.uk> wrote:

Syt mae Huw,  /* exhausts first year Welsh */

> In our first year of production we are unlikely to have jobs keeping
> the cluster full much of the time. So I'm considering writing something to
> watch the job queue and power down nodes that are not needed. The
> trick here being to work out some logic such that nodes aren't constantly 
> being power-cycled. Obviously this isn't an option unless you have
> some form of lights-out control (e.g IPMI) on your nodes.

FWIW the Moab scheduler supports power managing cluster
nodes via callouts to utilities (e.g. the IPMI tools) to
do such things, including hysteresis for nodes to prevent
over-eager cycling.

I know that Swinburne Uni here uses it for that on their
Dell cluster "Green", as you can see from their public
Ganglia interface:

http://green.ssi.swin.edu.au/ganglia/

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