[Beowulf] Definition of HPC

[Mark Hahn]

> What problems?

performance, of course.  drop_caches is really only sane for 
benchmarking, where you want to control for hot/cold caches.
otherwise, you're almost certainly better off either letting 
the kernel optimize global caching, and/or fix your application
to avoid polluting the cache (O_DIRECT, madvise, etc).

chip vendors could provide a drop_caches for CPUs, too, and it would 
also be "non-destructive".  afaik, such instructions do exist, and 
are always privileged, for basically DOS-based the same reason.

regards, mark hahn.