Hi- I am totally stumped and at a complete loss on this one.
In an 'old school' manner (a.k.a poor man's grid engine), it is a common practice (at least for me) to open multiple terminal windows on a mullti-core machine. Submitting a job in each terminal window will send it to a core which is not being used. On this particular set of machines I have been doing this for about 2 years. About a month ago, I attempted to resume some work in this same manner (yes, I am moving toward install Sun Grid Engine, but that is a different issue). Much to my confusion jobs were only sent to 1 core, and, moreover, the core was not running at 100% (which is should have been and did so in the past). I put this issue aside for a while as I was trying to troubleshoot an application which I was able to do. But, the above issue still persists. All of the above was done with the SL 6.1 kernel prior to the one which is currently installed [2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Mar 6 15:45:33 CST 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux]. Note that nothing had changed on these machines between the time I last used this processing strategy about 1 month ago and Monday. Potentially related, extracting a tar file (say 20 20MB files) takes MANY MINUTES for each file, when it should only take a few seconds, as it did in the past. The machines have Intel i980 E CPUs (6 x 2 cores) and 24GB of memory each, so resources are not an issue. Because I was so dumbfounded, I completely reinstalled SL 6.1, applied updates (running the kernel listed above), but the problem(s) still exit. I'm convinced it has to be a kernel issue, but that doesn't explain why it was working 2 months ago with the previous kernel and then Monday (w/o any updates or changes), multiple terminal won't send jobs to multiple cores. Does anyone have any idea what might me causing this. Suggest on how to further troubleshoot? Thanks for ANY suggestions. Regards, Wil
