[Beowulf] Best Way to Use 48-cores For Undergrad Cluster?

[Jon Forrest]

Let's say you were going to set up a cluster
for undergraduates to learn how to use
SGE and run typical chemistry applications.
Ultimate performance is not the primary goal.
Let's say you get charged for rack space
in your data center and there's very little
budget to pay for space.

I see you can now get 48-cores in one 1U box.
What do you think about running all the
compute nodes as 1-core virtual machines on
the one box? Or, would you just run
the machine with one OS and a SGE
queue with 47 slots (with 1 core for the frontend)?

This is probably not the kind of environment
most of you run in, but it does present
interesting issues.

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu