A great publicity stunt, but I still don't think it qualifies as a "real" HPC cluster achievement. See comments/objections in-line below.
On 04/07/2011 04:56 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html&pagename=/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html&site=datacenter&nsdr=n > > > The cluster ran for eight hours That's not very long for HPC jobs. How much would the performance have degraded if it started to run into the daytime hours, when demand for CPU cycles in EC2 would be at their peak? > Genentech benefited from the high number of cores > because its calculations were "embarrassingly parallel," with no > communication between nodes, so performance stats "scaled linearly with the > number of cores," Corn said. > So it wasn't really a cluster at all, but a giant batch scheduling system. I probably have a stricter sense of what makes a cluster than some others, so let's not argue on the the definition of cluster and split hairs. In my book, a cluster involves parallel communication between the processes using MPI, PVM or some other parallel communications paradigm. And BTW, my comments are not directed Eugene for posting this. Just starting a general discussion on this article... -- Prentice _______________________________________________ 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
