[Beowulf] New member, upgrading our existing Beowulf cluster

[Bill Broadley]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 12:57:07PM +1100, Chris Samuel wrote:
> 
>> If you've got a job running on there for a month
>> or two then there's a fairly high opportunity cost
>> involved.
> 
> That kind of policy has a fairly high opportunity cost, even before
> you factor in linked nodes. E.g. you see a system disk going bad, but
> the user will lose all their output unless the job runs for 4 more
> weeks...

Indeed.  You'd hope that such long running jobs would checkpoint.  Seems like
the perfect place for virtualization.  Seems like for mostly CPU bound jobs
the overhead is getting pretty low.  Then you get all kinds of benefits:
* Checkpointing
* Migration
* easy backfill

Seems like it would be real popular with the admins.  Anyone doing this?