[Beowulf] scheduler recommendations for a HPC cluster

[Rahul Nabar]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Bill Rankin <wrankin at duke.edu> wrote:
> Hi Rahul,
>
> If you are looking at the commercial offerings, you may want to also
> consider PBS Professional from Altair Engineering.
>
> http://www.pbspro.com/
>
> In the name of full disclosure, I work for the PBS division of Altair.
>

How does one compare different schedulers, anyways? Is it mostly "word
of mouth" and reputation. Feature sets are good to look at but it's
not really a quantitative metric. Are there any third party
comparisons of various schedulers? Do they have a niche that one
scheduler outperforms another?

Perhaps my quest for a quantitative metric is stupid. Maybe this is
one of the many areas of technology where things are more qualitative
than quantitative anyways. Price/ performance is always hard to define
but for schedulers this seems impossible.

The other issue seems to be per core licensing. To me it seems as an
admin the amount of time and effort one puts in configuring a
scheduler for a 50 core system and a 2000 core system is not grossly
too different (maybe I am wrong?). The license cost on the other hand
scales with cores. That makes the justification even harder.

-- 
Rahul