At a recent Rocks clustering user's group meeting the recent addition of Rocks support of Xen-based virtual clusters came up. Some of the same questions recently raised on this list were discussed there.
One justification for virtual clusters that I hadn't thought of was discussed. This only applies in places with large clusters run by a central computing group but used by various internal customers. Using virtual clusters makes it very easy to supply clusters to customers who need a cluster for a limited period of time. The amount of effort necessary to provision a new cluster is minimal. Nodes can easily and quickly be added, if necessary. This is as opposed to buying a new cluster for a research group, using it for a couple of months, and then turning it off. So, in this case, virtualized clusters have the advantage of being easier to manage. The performance overhead caused by the virtualization is a factor, but it's decreasing as time goes on due to better hardware support of virtualization and cleverer software. Cordially, -- Jon Forrest Research Computing Support College of Chemistry 173 Tan Hall University of California Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1460 510-643-1032 [email protected] _______________________________________________ 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
