[Beowulf] Utility Supercomputing...

[Mark Hahn]

>> Utility being a phrase that identifies how one can
>> turn on and off resource at the drop of a hat.  If you are running
>> nodes 100% 365d/y on prem is still a serious win.  If you have the odd
>> monster run, or are in a small shop with no access to large scale
>> compute, utility is the only way to go

again, if you have a bursty load, you want to use a shared facility,
of which, EC2 spot instances is just one example.

> How common is it to report the occupancy of a cluster - ie the percentage of the theoretical max CPU hours
> which are being used to run useful jobs?

it is _the_ normal way to describe how well a cluster is run/utilized.