Re: First Beowulf cluster. Some pointers?
>>>>> "e" == exa <Eray> writes:
e> "A.J. Rossini" wrote:
>> In fact, since it'll enhance balancing for PVM/MPI, you might
>> say that it has all the world to do with it.
e> where on earth did you make that up? :)
On the cluster and code I use for simulations, of course :-).
e> It won't enhance anything for a parallel virtual machine that
e> has to know the topology.
It WILL balance jobs which are run via PVM/MPI, esp if you've got
multiple processes on the same nodes. PVM/MPI are not
load-balancing, not without a good bit of direct coding.
e> otoh, it has got something to do with beowulf of course, since
e> a distributed os extension may run on a beowulf cluster. since
e> that thing probably wastes a lot of bandwidth, an optimized
e> beowulf interconnect would speed things up for it. :)
e> mosix doesn't have much to do with HPC, so we can say that it
e> isn't very related to a beowulf class supercomputer.
It is a nice tool for HPC, depending on the jobs you do. It enhances
the underlying system, at a lower level than PVM/MPI/shmem. It's
definitely NOT a panacea. You still have to write the parallel code.
If you've got a really tight process and are targetting differential
code at specific nodes in a topology, of course it's pretty useless.
But that's a specific example (though I admit there are numerous other
examples when MOSIX won't enhance the performance -- but you can
always lock processes onto particular nodes in the topology).
But in general, it's a nice tool.
Maybe it's not the tool for the HPC problems _YOU_ have; perhaps
you've got a nice scenario where your cluster is only running a single
HPC job at a time, and your nodes are equivalent. But for those of us
with a smallish clusters running several large, indeterminately
long-term jobs from numerous sources/people...
best,
-tony
--
A.J. Rossini Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
UW Biostat/Center for AIDS Research rossini@u.washington.edu
FHCRC/SCHARP/HIV Vaccine Trials Net rossini@scharp.org
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