Mark Kosmowski wrote:
At some point there a cost-benefit analysis needs to be performed. If my cluster at peak usage only uses 4 Gb RAM per CPU (I live in single-core land still and do not yet differentiate between CPU and core) and my nodes all have 16 Gb per CPU then I am wasting RAM resources and would be better off buying new machines and physically transferring the RAM to and from them or running more jobs each distributed across fewer CPUs. Or saving on my electricity bill and powering down some nodes.
Possible, though if you do heavy IO even with single core chips, and you are running a 64 bit OS, the extra buffer cache is not to be rejected lightly.
As heretical as this last sounds, I'm tempted to throw in the towel on my PhD studies because I can no longer afford the power to run my three node cluster at home. Energy costs may end up being the straw that breaks this camel's back.
Which country are you in? You may be able to apply for "free" computing resources. Tera-grid in the US, other similar resources. Mark Hahn might give you pointers for Canada, and the folks at Streamline/Clustervision/... might be able to give you pointers for UK/EU.
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