[Beowulf] New member, upgrading our existing Beowulf cluster

[james bardin]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Prentice Bisbal <prentice at ias.edu> wrote:

> You'd hope that. Most of my current clusters users are scientific
> researchers in academia, not computer scientists. While some are
> extremely computer savvy, others have learned just enough about
> programming to do their calculations. Expecting the latter to write code
> with checkpointing is unrealistic, and working in academia, I can't
> force them to. Which is why taking down 4 nodes instead of just one is
> less than ideal.
>

I find it's still advantageous to push them to learn it. A researcher
working with a tight deadline for a grant will often see the light
when a hardware failure loses them a month or more of data processing.
It really is in their own best interests to learn about their tools.