[Beowulf] vmware perfomance

[Mark Hahn]

> Hi! I am new in clustering, and I want to begin with the Beowulf Cluster,
> but I have one doubt: vmware enjoy the performance of the cluster? I mean,
> using the Beowulf cluster i will have a better perfomance with the vmware??
> Will vmware work faster and better?

certainly not.  _nothing_ works better on a cluster - that's not the point.
the point of HPC clusters is to make it easy to use many (same-speed)
processes at the same time, often cooperating in the same job (MPI).
the basic assumption of HPC clusters is that all processes are, or should be,
compute-bound.

vmware is completely orthogonal to this, and is mainly targetted at 
non-compute-bound processes like webservers.  by virtualizing such 
"sparsely-executing" programs, they can be overlapped and share a smaller
number of resources.  the ideal host for vm hosting would be as big an SMP
as you can get your hands on.