On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 08:19 -0400, Glen Beane wrote: > I think the term “node” is a loaded term in HPC. This is what comes > to mind when I hear node, and I’m sure a lot of other people think the > same: A node is a physical building block of a cluster. It has an > operating system, it probably has some kind of daemon running to > launch jobs submitted to a batch system. It is managed as a single > unit, but may contain many processors & cores. I don’t think anyone > in the HPC field would say that a cluster of 128 systems with 8 cores > per system is a 1024 node cluster. They would say it is a 128 node > cluster with 1024 cores. It has 128 operating system instances > running, 128 pbs_moms, etc. Calling it a 1024 node cluster is > misleading. Much of the management here tend to confuse node with > core, but we’re a genetics research laboratory and most people don’t > have a background in this.
There is an awful lot of software around which refers to "nodes" when in your nomenclature it means core[1], most of it harks back to when nodes had one CPU and a CPU had one core. Even the concept of cores themselves are only six or seven years old, before then a CPU was just a CPU and you would refer to "a N CPU cluster". All in it can be confusing, particularly when dealing with specifications or software which is more than one generation of hardware old. Ashley, [1] Of course I'm actually referring to process here and assuming that your job has a 1<=>1 mapping of cores to processes. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
