[Beowulf] Haswell as supercomputer microprocessors

[Chris Samuel]

On Mon, 3 Aug 2015 12:06:27 PM Mikhail Kuzminsky wrote:

> Current Intel Haswell E5 v3 may also have 18 = 2**4 +2 cores.  Is there some
> sense to try POWER BQC or SPARC64 XIfx ideas (not exactly), and use only 16
> Haswell cores for parallel computations ? If the answer is "yes", then how
> to use this way under Linux ?

Doing this with Linux predates BGQ for instance - the whole cpuset idea came 
from SGI and was used on their Itanic Altix systems to provide a boot CPU set 
that would have all system processes confined into and then the rest of the 
cores were available for jobs.

When we used to use Torque I agitated for cpuset support, and for it to be 
done in a way that would allow this.

We use Slurm now, but I've never looked at how easy to make it work in the 
boot cpuset type mode - it's probably just a matter of telling it there are 
N-1 cores per node and ensuring that it doesn't try and claim the same core 
you're using as the boot cpuset. :-)

Best of luck!
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci