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

[Dave Love]

"Joshua mora acosta" <joshua_mora at usa.net> writes:

> If you do virtualization you may want at least to pin the guest OS to each
> core and provide a "quota" of main memory local to that core to that
> guest OS.

I don't see how that would help in this case except, maybe, for a
frontend VM, to maintain resources for it.  It gives less freedom to
pack the teaching jobs on.

> You could even go further by "carving" the number of cores and memory amount
> and the proper pinning provided when you submit the job it reads those
> specifications and then if those HW resources are available then you would
> start that guest OS with those specifications and then run that workload.
> This last thing would be the dynamic provisioning.

Such provisioning isn't representative of typical computational
chemistry setups, is it?  Partitioning the system might be useful to
teach SGE resource requests in a distributed system, but different OSes
would considerably complicate things.

> Another good experiment would be the migration from one guest OS to another
> guest OS (checkpoint on guest OS 1 and restart on guest OS 2).

Why would you want to, and how could you expect it to work in general
(e.g. BLCR, DMTCP checkpointing)?  There is experience scheduling Xen
VMs with a modified SGE (e.g. Uni Marburg's XGE), but I don't see it
helping the teaching.