Head node of scyld cluster.

[Daniel Ridge]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Jeff Largent wrote:

> With the scyld cluster what is the load on the head node?
> What I'm really looking for is can a much less powerful
> p133 control a small 4 slave cluster of P3 650s?

The load on the head node is usually pretty low -- unless you run jobs on
it. I find that I often want the frontend participating in non-trivial
jobs as rank 0 as a special master/dispatcher so that I can expect to be
able to read config files in that process and broadcast the results to
all of the others.

This job does not usually do much computation and is often pretty light on
the communication as well. Keeping rank 0 on the frontend also makes it
easier to do things like open an X window.

Regards,
	Dan Ridge
	Scyld Computing Corporation