[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf Digest, Vol 53, Issue 1

[Joe Landman]

Mark Kosmowski wrote:
> At some point there a cost-benefit analysis needs to be performed.  If
> my cluster at peak usage only uses 4 Gb RAM per CPU (I live in
> single-core land still and do not yet differentiate between CPU and
> core) and my nodes all have 16 Gb per CPU then I am wasting RAM
> resources and would be better off buying new machines and physically
> transferring the RAM to and from them or running more jobs each
> distributed across fewer CPUs.  Or saving on my electricity bill and
> powering down some nodes.

Possible, though if you do heavy IO even with single core chips, and you 
are running a 64 bit OS, the extra buffer cache is not to be rejected 
lightly.

> 
> As heretical as this last sounds, I'm tempted to throw in the towel on
> my PhD studies because I can no longer afford the power to run my
> three node cluster at home.  Energy costs may end up being the straw
> that breaks this camel's back.

Which country are you in?  You may be able to apply for "free" computing 
resources.   Tera-grid in the US, other similar resources.  Mark Hahn 
might give you pointers for Canada, and the folks at 
Streamline/Clustervision/... might be able to give you pointers for UK/EU.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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