[Beowulf] disabling swap on cluster nodes?

Mahmood Sayed mahmood.sayed at duke.edu
Fri Feb 6 16:45:32 PST 2015


Prentice, 

We regularly configure our compute nodes without any swap partition. There have been no adverse effects on the systems' performance under load. We're running clusters with everything from RHEL5/RHEL6 and the FOS variants thereof to several LTS versions of Ubuntu. RAM per node ranges from 32GB to 1TB. Jobs have run for several weeks without issue. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mahmood A. Sayed
Sr Systems Programmer
Research Support
Pratt School of Engineering
Duke University
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> On Feb 6, 2015, at 5:35 PM, Prentice Bisbal <prentice.bisbal at rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
> Do any of you disable swap on your compute nodes?
> 
> I brought this up in a presentation I gave last night on HPC system administration, but realized I never actually did this, or know of anyone who has. I would tweak the vm.overcommit_memory setting, but that's not the same as disabling swap altogether. I'd like to try doing this in the future, but I prefer to learn from someone else's mistakes first.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Prentice
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf


More information about the Beowulf mailing list