[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:

> andrew holway wrote:
>> Sod all this tin pot stuff.
>> 
>> Buying all this crap, sticking it in a rack and stringing it together
>> with wire aint difficult. Making the damn software work is the tricky
>> bit.
>> 
>> Get loads of ram, vmware-server and BINGO! you have a cluster!
>> 
>
> But this isn't a cluster - it's enterprise masturbation. We're talking about
> HPC, not running payrolls on a server. It's all about performance.
> Running a bunch of VM instances on a server is not really HPC to me.
> Of course, it's a GREAT way to learn and I know a bunch of people
> who use for testing and development.

And as noted, it may be a reasonable way to build a dynamically
repurposeable cluster intended to run certain classes of EP or not
terribly communication intensive tasks.  And one day it might be even
more, if people build low overhead hooks that allow specific hardware
devices to be dedicated to the VM kernels.  Which eventually the
probably will.

   rgb

>
> Jeff
>
>
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-- 
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
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