[Beowulf] New member, upgrading our existing Beowulf cluster

[Prentice Bisbal]

Prentice Bisbal
Linux Software Support Specialist/System Administrator
School of Natural Sciences
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ


Bill Broadley wrote:
> 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.  

You'd hope that. Most of my current clusters users are scientific
researchers in academia, not computer scientists. While some are
extremely computer savvy, others have learned just enough about
programming to do their calculations. Expecting the latter to write code
with checkpointing is unrealistic, and working in academia, I can't
force them to. Which is why taking down 4 nodes instead of just one is
less than ideal.

--
Prentice