[Beowulf] What services do you run on your cluster nodes?

[Eric Thibodeau]

Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> The more services you run on your cluster node (gmond, sendmail, etc.)
> the less performance is available for number crunching, but at the same
> time, administration difficulty increases. For example, if you turn off
> postfix/sendmail, you'll no longer get automated e-mails from your
> system to alert you to a problem.
>
> My question is this: how extreme do you go in disabling non-essential
> services on your cluster nodes? Do you turn off *everything* that's not
> absolutely necessary, do you leave somethings running to make
> administration easier?
>   
Everything is turned off and, most of the time, a quick glance at 
ganglia brings out problems. Simple scripts can be built to perform 
cyclic checks on the nodes and would be less disruptive IMHO.
> I'm curious to see how everyone else has their cluster(s) configured.
>   
The only actual research I found on OS interference impacting HPC 
computing is titled "A measurement and simulation methodology for 
parallel computing performance studies" by Matthew Joseph Sottile. I 
would be curious to know if anyone else has dipped into the subject and 
come up with conclusive results on the subject.

Eric