thanks for all yoru responses. i admit i dont have the money at the moment or a job to get my hands dirty with hpc. im planning in the future to setup a rendering cluster. i appreciate all the feed back here.
im just wondering now would for instance a head node be of any use running virtualized guest os's or does the head node need to not share the hardware with other os's On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Gavin Burris <[email protected]> wrote: > The cost for virtualization is in buying really big hardware, oodles of > memory and many many cores, that are capable of running multiple VMs, > and having that hardware configured for redundancy, high availability > and failover. > > With an HPC cluster, you are typically buying hardware that is as > stripped down and cheap as you can get it. You focus your HPC budget on > the sweet-spot processor, the amount of memory, maybe GPUs, maybe > interconnect, so you can deploy as many compute server nodes as you can > afford. > > I don't buy the argument that the winning case is packaging up a VM with > all your software. If you really are unable to build the required > software stack for a given cluster and its OS, I think using something > like xCAT to provision stateless compute servers per job is a better > option than virtualization. > > And if you are packaging VMs to blast out to the cloud, I think you will > be paying through the nose. This is not a viable option unless there is > a major pricing shift. > > Cheers. > > > On 01/27/2010 07:08 AM, Jonathan Aquilina wrote: > > gavin you mentioned costs, those are only incurred with xen if you need > > the extra features such as server migration and other features. also if > > you dont need those extra features couldnt you just live with the free > > version of xen. > > > > On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Geoff Galitz <[email protected] > > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > > > > > > I've had the good fortune to be in the HPC and also HA business for > > a few > > years (10 years for HPC but only about 4 for HA). Given the current > > approach for virtualization I don't see that Xen or other > virtualization > > technologies are good for HPC environments if the performance is a > > paramount > > concern. > > > > Virtualization in an HPC/HA world is mostly beneficial for > > portability and > > fail-over. But the added layer for a hypervisor will be significant > > if your > > jobs run for an extended period of time. I've seen jobs that run for > > months... a 7% performance penalty (fairly typical in my > > experience) over > > the course of a month is significant. > > > > > > > > --------------------------------- > > Geoff Galitz > > Blankenheim NRW, Germany > > http://www.galitz.org/ > > http://german-way.com/blog/ > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] > > <mailto:[email protected]> sponsored by Penguin Computing > > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Jonathan Aquilina > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Jonathan Aquilina
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