[Beowulf] Definition of HPC

[Max R. Dechantsreiter]

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Mark Hahn wrote:

>> What problems?
>
> performance, of course.  drop_caches is really only sane for benchmarking, 
> where you want to control for hot/cold caches.

Indeed.

I thought you might know of harmful instances of which I was unaware.

> 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.
>