I've presently set up a cluster of 5 AMD dual-core linux boxes for my students (at a small college). I've got MPICH running, shared NIS/NFS home directories etc. After reading the MPICH installation guide and manual, I can't say I understand how to deploy MPICH for my students to use. So far as I can tell, there no load balancing or migration of processes in the library, and so now I'm trying to figure out what piece of software to add to the cluster to (for example) prevent the starting of an MPI job when there's already another job running.

(1) Is openPBS or gridengine the appropriate tool to use for a multi- user system where mpich is available? Are there better scheduling options?

(1.5) Can mortals install and configure Gridengine? Thus far it seems too wonderful for me to understand.

(2) Also, if my cluster is made up of a mix of single and dual processor machines, what's the proper way to tell mpd about that topology?

(3) Its likely that in the future I'll have part-time access to another cluster of dual-boot (XP/linux) machines. The machines will default to booting to Linux, but will occasionally (5-20 hours a week) be used as windows workstations by a console user (when a user is finished, they'll restart the machine and it will boot back to linux). If cluster nodes are available in this sort of unpredictable and intermittent way, can they be used as compute nodes in some fashion? Wil gridengine/PBS /??? take care of this sort of process migration?

best regards,

Nathan



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Nathan Moore
Physics
Winona State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
AIM:nmoorewsu


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