I think measuring a clusters success based on the number of jobs run or cpu's used is a bad measure of true success. I would be more inclined to consider a cluster a success by speaking with the people who use it and find out not only whether they can use it effectively and/or what new science having cluster is being enabled by them.
then only thing i find most of the below metrics overly useful is figuring out whether or not we need a bigger cluster. which i guess is a form of measurable success, but not one in which i would consider the "cluster" to be a success. it could just be dopes running thousands of "/bin/hostname" jobs trying to figure out how to use the cluster I also think you need to ask the "business" people what measure they would consider a cluster as a worthwhile investment, it doesn't sound as if you have that from your email. On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Stuart Barkley <stua...@4gh.net> wrote: > What sort of business management level metrics do people measure on > clusters? Upper management is asking for us to define and provide > some sort of "numbers" which can be used to gage the success of our > cluster project. > > We currently have both SGE and Torque/Moab in use and need to measure > both if possible. > > I can think of some simple metrics (well sort-of, actual technical > definition/measurement may be difficult): > > - 90/95th percentile wait time for jobs in various queues. Is smaller > better meaning the jobs don't wait long and users are happy? Is > larger better meaning that we have lots of demand and need more > resources? > > - core-hours of user computation (per queue?) both as raw time and > percentage of available time. Again, which is better (management > view) higher or lower? > > - Availability during scheduled hours (ignoring scheduled maintenance > times). Common metric, but how do people actually measure/compute > this? What about down nodes? Some scheduled percentage (5%?) assumed > down? > > - Number of new science projects performed. Vague, but our > applications support people can just count things occasionally. > Misses users who just use the system without interaction with us. > Misses "production" work that just keeps running. > > Any comments or ideas are welcome. > > Thanks, > Stuart Barkley > -- > I've never been lost; I was once bewildered for three days, but never lost! > -- Daniel Boone > _______________________________________________ > 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 > _______________________________________________ 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
