[Beowulf] cloudy HPC?

[Mark Hahn]

> Given prior art, I'm totally taking the fifth on this one ;-) hehehe!

well, I notice in that old thread, you did not explain how 
your EC2 config differs from the 66% worse-performing "internal kit".
it's a claim that falls into the same category as cold fusion.
(not impossible, but would be silly to accept at face value.)


> BTW: Chris Loken did an awesome job of explaining some of the .ca HPC
> infrastructure and made mention of some really good strategic
> investments that have been made in the past at our latest meeting down
> at the NCSA.  The slides are posted:
>
> http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Conferences/ARCC/agenda.html

I'm pleased he reported the messy or embarassing bits.  I prefer 
to describe Compute Canada as a dotted line around drawn around
about 20 largely independent sites.  some "sites" have a fairly
uniform user experience on multiple clusters, but most clusters 
are a single, arbitrarily diverging cluster, at a single location.

in any case, it's a huge mess now (which is not to imply we're
not getting useful work done.)

so, any substantive comments about heterogenous loads on IaaS?

thanks, Mark Hahn.