in regards to the models you run couldnt you wait until your about to leave for the day and let it run over night? to be honest i dont have much of a need for clustering at the moment. the only thing i can really run on this windows monster is boinc projects which i do. also gus doesnt the amount of cache play a role in regards to be able to working on the machine while crunching numbers, wont it keep swapping, etc to a minimum?
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:36 AM, Gus Correa <[email protected]> wrote: > Glen Beane wrote: > >> >> >> >> On 4/21/09 3:46 PM, "Jonathan Aquilina" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> is it possible to have a single multicored machine as a cluster? >> >> >> >> That wouldn’t exactly be a cluster, would it? But you can certainly run a >> lot of the software associated with Beowulf clusters: a batch system >> (TORQUE, SGE, etc), MPI, ... so in practice you can use your 8 core >> workstation just like you would a cluster. >> >> >> -- >> Glen L. Beane >> Software Engineer >> The Jackson Laboratory >> Phone (207) 288-6153 >> >> >> > Hi Jonathan, Glen, list > > Along the lines that Glen pointed out, > I setup a dual-socket dual-core workstation here with OpenMPI > and MPICH2, plus Torque, to run some of our atmosphere modeling code > in batch mode. > It is not really a cluster, but a workstation > with some software characteristic of a cluster. > > We tend to have long series of atmospheric model runs, where > each one-year simulation restarts from the previous state where > the last run stopped. > Each run can take, say, half a day to complete, > and the whole series may take a week to a month to finish. > Queuing the jobs up on Torque/PBS, > and forgetting about them until the whole series is done is > very convenient. > > This setup works fine as long as the workstation is relatively idle. > However, if/when the owner decides to run heavy data analysis > Matlab scripts interactively while the MPI jobs are running, > then we get to memory contention, swapping, and all those bad things > that kill performance and may even break MPI jobs. > This "time shared" interactive activity, that is typically absent in > cluster nodes, is germane to workstations. > > Fortunately, I could convince the workstation owner (who also wants > the output of the atmospheric model runs) to do heavy interactive > use only when there aren't jobs on the Torque queue. > Or to suspend the job queue, wait for running jobs to complete, > work interactively, then restart the queue. > > You can think of other heavy interactive use (e.g. streaming video) > that can produce the same negative impact on MPI jobs, > and you may need to adopt a similar > policy to avoid conflict between interactive and batch use > in your workstation, if you set it up "as a cluster". > > My two cents. > > Gus Correa > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Gustavo Correa > Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory - Columbia University > Palisades, NY, 10964-8000 - USA > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Jonathan Aquilina
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