Hi, i suggest you not only look at the flexibility / complexity regarding administrating a cluster with OpenStack [there are also many other tools for that] but also *actually benchmark* with a parallel (threaded) code you know well and check the strong scaling via Amdhal's law by making some speedup graphs on VMs and baremetal. You might actually be throwing away a lot of raw cpu power for *real* HPC codes by doing things on VMs. Serial on VMs != parallel on VMs: It all depends on your codes and the VM details now.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221565869_Virtual_Machine_Scalability_on_Multi-Core_Processors_Based_Servers_for_Cloud_Computing_Workloads P.S. in the paper above, the mentioned floating point micro benchmarks are 'trivially parallel': all cores work independently without any communication and do not share a single bigger workload. This is certainly not the case for actual HPC codes and these will not show such linearly perfect scaling neither on VMs, nor on bare metal. Mark Somers -- mark somers tel: +31715274437 mail: m.som...@chem.leidenuniv.nl web: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/mark-somers _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
