[Beowulf] 1 multicore machine cluster

[Jonathan Aquilina]

i know im taking my own thread of topic but i just installed boinc and it is
nice to see some of the projects using cuda now :). now i just have to deal
with heating issue that all this computation is generating. also im super
impressed with the performance of my processor as well.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:36 AM, Gus Correa <gus at ldeo.columbia.edu> wrote:

> Glen Beane wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 4/21/09 3:46 PM, "Jonathan Aquilina" <eagles051387 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>    is it possible to have a single multicored machine as a cluster?
>>
>>
>>
>> That wouldn’t exactly be a cluster, would it?  But you can certainly run a
>> lot of the software associated with Beowulf clusters: a batch system
>> (TORQUE, SGE, etc), MPI, ... so in practice you can use your 8 core
>> workstation just like you would a cluster.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Glen L. Beane
>> Software Engineer
>> The Jackson Laboratory
>> Phone (207) 288-6153
>>
>>
>>
> Hi Jonathan, Glen, list
>
> Along the lines that Glen pointed out,
> I setup a dual-socket dual-core workstation here with OpenMPI
> and MPICH2, plus Torque, to run some of our atmosphere modeling code
> in batch mode.
> It is not really a cluster, but a workstation
> with some software characteristic of a cluster.
>
> We tend to have long series of atmospheric model runs, where
> each one-year simulation restarts from the previous state where
> the last run stopped.
> Each run can take, say, half a day to complete,
> and the whole series may take a week to a month to finish.
> Queuing the jobs up on Torque/PBS,
> and forgetting about them until the whole series is done is
> very convenient.
>
> This setup works fine as long as the workstation is relatively idle.
> However, if/when the owner decides to run heavy data analysis
> Matlab scripts interactively while the MPI jobs are running,
> then we get to memory contention, swapping, and all those bad things
> that kill performance and may even break MPI jobs.
> This "time shared" interactive activity, that is typically absent in
> cluster nodes, is germane to workstations.
>
> Fortunately, I could convince the workstation owner (who also wants
> the output of the atmospheric model runs) to do heavy interactive
> use only when there aren't jobs on the Torque queue.
> Or to suspend the job queue, wait for running jobs to complete,
> work interactively, then restart the queue.
>
> You can think of other heavy interactive use (e.g. streaming video)
> that can produce the same negative impact on MPI jobs,
> and you may need to adopt a similar
> policy to avoid conflict between interactive and batch use
> in your workstation, if you set it up "as a cluster".
>
> My two cents.
>
> Gus Correa
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Gustavo Correa
> Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory - Columbia University
> Palisades, NY, 10964-8000 - USA
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Jonathan Aquilina
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