[Beowulf] Deskside clusters

[Jon Forrest]

One thing I did a while back was to hook up all the research group's
desktop machines into a virtual cluster. In this case, they were high
end Mac Pros. I installed SGE and a shared filesystem and let 'em rip.
The virtual cluster jobs ran at a priority lower (higher) than normal
interactive processes so the desktops' users (hardly) noticed.

Sure, it wasn't as fast or pretty as a real cluster, but it falls into
the computational category I invented called Pretty High Performance
Computing (PHPC).

Cordially,
Jon Forrest
UC Berkeley (ret.)