[Beowulf] "Part-time" beowulf clusters

[Felix Rauch Valenti]

On 9/22/05, Paulo Ferreira de Sousa <ferreiradesousa at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to know information about "part-time" clusters (I don't
> know if there's a specific name for it).
[...]

We had a few clusters that worked like this and we named them
multi-use, multi-boot or multi-purpose clusters.

An early cluster was our "Patagonia" 24-node cluster that we described
in a workshop paper in 1999 [1]. It was basically a classroom cluster
that was used for different courses that required different OSs and
also as a beowulf-like cluster over night and weekends.

Another one was the "Xibalba" 128-node cluster [2]. It was shared
between different research groups that had different requirements and
operating systems.

In all cases we had all the OSs installed on the nodes' local disks
and used PXE to remotely select the next OS to boot into.

- Felix

[1] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/publications/
[2] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/xibalba/