[Beowulf] Re: Best Way to Use 48-cores For Undergrad Cluster?

[Dave Love]

John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> writes:

> Joshua mentions 'pinning' the guest OS - which sounds interesting and
> we should hear more about that if possible.

Isn't it fairly clear you'd want that for efficiency, assuming you
haven't lost much wit hthe VM?  However, you typically can't use
affinity within a multi-core VM (e.g. Xen on RH5).

> If you go the route of having one machine with many cores, borrowing a
> technique from big NUMA you could look at cpusets.

I don't see why that would be relevant in this teaching case, especially
if over-subscription is useful there.

> I know that PBS integrates well with cpusets on the Altix, SGE should also.

As far as I remember, cpusets don't work cleanly because the DRM doesn't
have sufficient control.  SGE now supports core binding (using the same
library as OpenMPI).