[Beowulf] How to restrict CPU usage (kindly solve this)

Chris Dagdigian dag at sonsorol.org
Mon Aug 2 10:06:03 PDT 2004



Mark Hahn wrote:

>>i have made a 4 node cluster now how to restrict CPU usage of a particular
>>node i.e. if i want node 2's CPU not to exceed 70% usage.........  
> 
> 
> Linux doesn't do that.  and I suspect it's not really what you want - 
> what actual problem are you trying to solve?
> 
> you could pretty easily write a daemon that fiddled with the cpu affinity
> maps (for interrupts and processes), and accomplished something close.
> but the 70% is somewhat nonsensical unless you do something crude like 
> run one process bound to the CPU and use SIGSTOP/CONT to timeslice it
> at .7 duty cycle.  (in the Linux approach, exotic requirements like this
> are and should be delegated to user-space, not put into the kernel.)
> 
> there are some obscure and probably disused patches which might go in 
> these directions, such as hacks to the scheduler.  I suspect you should
> explain what your goal is, rather than the solution you have jumped to.
> 
> this also has very little to do with beowulfry.


Linux may not do that but there are a whole slew of "distributed 
resource management" software suites that can do that. I suspect the 
original poster may be asking "how do I configure PBS or Grid Engine or 
Platform LSF or Condor, etc. etc. etc. on my cluster to keep systems at 
70% utilization..."

Akhtar- the base OS will not do this for you as Mark has mentioned.

Layered software running on your cluster nodes *can* do this for you but 
the implementation details vary depending on which software package you 
are using. If you happen to be running Grid Engine 
(http://gridengine.sunsource.net) then the best forum to get your answer 
would be to first read the manual and then if you still have questions, 
email the SGE list at users at gridengine.sunsource.net. Platform LSF has 
their own support infrastructure and I assume the OpenPBS and PBSPro 
folks also have their own mailing lists.

Regards,
Chris





-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
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