At 8:41pm -0400 Thu, 06 May 2010, Jon Forrest wrote: > I see you can now get 48-cores in one 1U box. What do you think > about running all the compute nodes as 1-core virtual machines on > the one box? Or, would you just run the machine with one OS and a > SGE queue with 47 slots (with 1 core for the frontend)?
I'm not an administrative type and haven't yet had to solve this style of problem, so I can't actually respond directly with an answer. I will briefly mention that this has recently become a perhaps-viable option to investigate thanks to the memory deduplication code that was incorporated into the Linux kernel as of 2.6.32. http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_32#head-d3f32e41df508090810388a57efce73f52660ccb http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kernel-shared-memory/index.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01LX-KSMdth-LX I haven't yet read anything about how it plays with HPC. Would not mind a link, if anyone has one. Another angle you might try is putting a portable cluster in your office or in class everyday. I'm not aware of the chemistry track software requirements, but you may be interested in a couple of ongoing HPC education oriented projects: http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ -> cluster attempting to be portable and to reduce the $/GFlop ratio. This article on clustermonkey.net may also be of interest: http://www.clustermonkey.net/content/view/211/1/ Finally, some related projects may also be of interest: http://littlefe.net/ -> inexpensive cluster created specifically with undergraduate (and younger) students in mind. Students can physically handle the components and can get a visceral experience of solving their problem. Hope this helps, Kevin _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
