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[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Christopher J. Morrone wrote:

> Thats not necessarily true.  On our cluster, the slave nodes were doing
> NIS lookups all though the computation, and average CPU usage on
> the head node was %80...probably related to the NFS
> usage.  But maybe the slaves can be set to cache the NIS info?

I think that this depends on what kind of job you are running.  Anything
that is spawning a lot of node connections or opening and closing a lot
of communication channels will require a lot of authentication or host
lookups.  Something that spawns slave tasks once and maintains open
communication channels only requires them once, at the beginning.

I wouldn't argue that the rdist strategy is likely to be the more
efficient of the two and that sometimes it will matter, but it is
probably very slightly more of a hassle to set up also.  If one is
already running NIS and your parallel job strategies aren't NIS-use
intensive then it may make more sense to just go ahead and use it.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu