Ashley Pittman wrote:
On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 14:56 -0400, Eric Thibodeau wrote:
My question is this: how extreme do you go in disabling non-essential
services on your cluster nodes? Do you turn off *everything* that's not
absolutely necessary, do you leave somethings running to make
administration easier?
If it were up to me I'd turn *everything* possible off except sshd and
ntp. The problem however is the maintenance cost of doing this, it's
fine if you've only got one cluster and one app but as soon as you try
to support multiple users on multiple distributions the cost of ensuring
everything is shut down on all of them skyrockets and it becomes easier
which is to stick with the status quo :(
O_o...you mean you're still using local OS installations ... ew!
Everything is turned off and, most of the time, a quick glance at
ganglia brings out problems. Simple scripts can be built to perform
cyclic checks on the nodes and would be less disruptive IMHO.
I'm curious to see how everyone else has their cluster(s) configured
Well, while at it, here are my node's services (this one I built 3years
ago, the new images are different now):
thinkbig1 ~ # rc-status
Runlevel: unionfs
ntp-client
[ started ]
ntpd
[ started ]
sshd
[ started ]
acpid
[ started ]
gmond
[ started ]
portmap
[ started ]
autofs
[ started ]
nfsmount
[ started ]
netmount
[ started ]
vixie-cron
[ started ]
local
[ started ]
Runlevel: UNASSIGNED
fsck
[ started ]
rpc.statd
[ started ]
udev-postmount
[ started ]
The only actual research I found on OS interference impacting HPC
computing is titled "A measurement and simulation methodology for
parallel computing performance studies" by Matthew Joseph Sottile. I
would be curious to know if anyone else has dipped into the subject and
come up with conclusive results on the subject.
At medium to large scales it becomes hugely important,
http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/paperpdfs/pap301.pdf
Also look at "whatelse" from http://www.c3.lanl.gov/pal/software.shtml
Ashley Pittman.
Hey, thanks for the links, I've coded my own whatelse (flimsy but does
the trick) and I'll read up the article.
Eric
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