Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Stuart Barkley
This is drifting off topic but I want to clarify two points: - I'm not advocating violating any licensing agreement. I am interested in aspects of environments which interact with license management code. - I suspect attempting to move a Windows VM between two different VM implementations is tro

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Robert G. Brown
On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Stuart Barkley wrote: On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 at 12:01 -, Robert G. Brown wrote: XPPro will run forever on the virtualized hardware interface as long as I can get linux to boot and run devices on the toplevel system. If I change machines, my XPPro VM can go with me without

Re: [Beowulf] XEON power variations

2009-09-16 Thread Bill Broadley
Tom Rockwell wrote: > Hi, > > Intel assigns the same power consumption to different clockspeeds of L, > E, X series XEON. All L series have the same rating, all E series etc. > So, taking their numbers, the fastest of each type will always have the > best performance per watt. Wrong, well they

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Stuart Barkley
On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 at 12:01 -, Robert G. Brown wrote: > XPPro will run forever on the virtualized hardware interface as long > as I can get linux to boot and run devices on the toplevel system. > If I change machines, my XPPro VM can go with me without all of the > tedious crap from Windows U

[Beowulf] [hpc-announce] CfP: Special Issue of JPDC on "Data Intensive Computing", Submission: Jan 15th 2010

2009-09-16 Thread Suren Byna
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on "Data Intensive Computing" --- Data intensive computing is posing many challenges in exploiting parallelism of current and upcoming comp

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Ashley Pittman
On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 13:04 -0500, David Ramirez wrote: > Still a newbie in HPC, in the first stages of building a Beowulf > cluster (8 nodes). > > I wonder if anybody out there has used Linux virtual machines in the > head node, just to be able to experiment with different configurations > & dep

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Joshua Baker-LePain
On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 at 12:01pm, Robert G. Brown wrote Unless/until Xen or KVM or something else comes out with a similarly powerful and tricked out console and ease of use and (still, overall) reliability, VMware will be on my personal laptops for the rest of time. It's just too useful a tool to

Re: [Beowulf] Re: switching capacity terminology confusion

2009-09-16 Thread Gerry Creager
Greg Lindahl wrote: On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 05:52:07PM -0500, Rahul Nabar wrote: "Forwarding Rate 131 Mpps" How does that tie in to the big picture? Most layer 3 devices are not capable of forwarding full line-rate traffic of tiny packets. You should go hunt down a lab report on switch testi

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Robert G. Brown
On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Tim Cutts wrote: On 15 Sep 2009, at 11:55 pm, Dmitry Zaletnev wrote: When install CentOS 5.3, you get Xen virtual machine for free, with a nice interface, and in it, modes with internal network and NAT to outside world work simultaneously, witch is not the case of Sun xV

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Tim Cutts
On 15 Sep 2009, at 11:55 pm, Dmitry Zaletnev wrote: When install CentOS 5.3, you get Xen virtual machine for free, with a nice interface, and in it, modes with internal network and NAT to outside world work simultaneously, witch is not the case of Sun xVM VirtualBox. Never used VMWare beca

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Dmitry Zaletnev
When install CentOS 5.3, you get Xen virtual machine for free, with a nice interface, and in it, modes with internal network and NAT to outside world work simultaneously, witch is not the case of Sun xVM VirtualBox. Never used VMWare because of its value of $189, people say it's a good VM. But w

[Beowulf] XEON power variations

2009-09-16 Thread Tom Rockwell
Hi, Intel assigns the same power consumption to different clockspeeds of L, E, X series XEON. All L series have the same rating, all E series etc. So, taking their numbers, the fastest of each type will always have the best performance per watt. And there is no power consumption penalty fo

Re: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Stuart Barkley
On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 at 14:04 -, David Ramirez wrote: > Still a newbie in HPC, in the first stages of building a Beowulf > cluster (8 nodes). Also a newbie to HPC, but now accumulating systems very quickly. > I wonder if anybody out there has used Linux virtual machines in the > head node, ju

Re: RS: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread David B. Ritch
At the RedHat Summit a couple of weeks ago, RH said that with a switch from Xen to KVM and lots of tuning, they were able to get the I/O overhead down to 5%. I thought that was pretty impressive. They also introduced a new product RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, which is supposed to support pro

Re: [Beowulf] bad bonnie++ in 14-drive RAID 10

2009-09-16 Thread stephen mulcahy
Eugen Leitl wrote: On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:18:27PM +0100, stephen mulcahy wrote: I'm not sure what else people read from bonnie++ results but I normally I realize people mostly prefer IOZone, or similar. Personally, I like bonnie++ for the general overview it gives. It's a shame there i

Re: [Beowulf] bad bonnie++ in 14-drive RAID 10

2009-09-16 Thread Joe Landman
Eugen Leitl wrote: Below bonnie++ stats are pretty bad for a RAID 10 of 14 SATA drives (WD RE4, 2 TByte), right? Well, we'd suggest using fio rather than bonnie++, but I'll save that for a post somewhere else. [ora...@localhost data]$ bonnie++ -d /data/blah [...] Version 1.03 --

Re: [Beowulf] bad bonnie++ in 14-drive RAID 10

2009-09-16 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:18:27PM +0100, stephen mulcahy wrote: > I'm not sure what else people read from bonnie++ results but I normally I realize people mostly prefer IOZone, or similar. > focus on the sequential output block (which I think of as "block write > speed" and sequential input b

Re: [Beowulf] bad bonnie++ in 14-drive RAID 10

2009-09-16 Thread stephen mulcahy
Hi, I'm not sure what else people read from bonnie++ results but I normally focus on the sequential output block (which I think of as "block write speed" and sequential input block (which I think of as "block read speed"). Smarter folk on this list may be able to provide a more scientific ana

[Beowulf] bad bonnie++ in 14-drive RAID 10

2009-09-16 Thread Eugen Leitl
Below bonnie++ stats are pretty bad for a RAID 10 of 14 SATA drives (WD RE4, 2 TByte), right? [ora...@localhost data]$ bonnie++ -d /data/blah Writing with putc()...done Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading with getc()...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...

Re: RS: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Tim Cutts
On 16 Sep 2009, at 8:23 am, Alan Ward wrote: I have been working quite a lot with VBox, mostly for server stuff. I agree it can be quite impressive, and has some nice features (e.g. do not stop a machine, sleep it - and wake up pretty fast). On the other hand, we found that anything that

RS: [Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

2009-09-16 Thread Alan Ward
I have been working quite a lot with VBox, mostly for server stuff. I agree it can be quite impressive, and has some nice features (e.g. do not stop a machine, sleep it - and wake up pretty fast). On the other hand, we found that anything that has to do with disk access is pretty slow, special