On Friday 14 July 2006 23:06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > H. Sami Sozuer wrote: > >> Hi folks, > >> > >> We have a 20-node cluster that we want to use both as diskless > >> workstations > >> that connect to a dual Xeon machine as X terminals and as nodes of > >> our cluster > >> that can run MPI programs. We've installed the ltsp > >> server on a FC5 and tried out a client and there is no problem, the > >> client
[snip] > MPI stands for Message Passing Interface and it's the most popular way > of running > parallel programs on many machines. So MPI itself is not a program but a > means for > programs running on many nodes of a cluster to communicate and work on a > single job. > What we have is a student computer lab that gets used for about 10 hours > a week, and in terms > of CPU usage, the yearly average would probably be less than 0.1 per > cent! Imagine all those > > CPUs just sitting idly for nearly their entire lifetime. > So what we thought would be smart was to have each machine connect to a > server, LTSP style, > and use the CPU resources of the server, while we wanted to run number > crunching applications > on the CPUs of each individual node (3GHz P4 Prescott). The server alone [snip] The idea is cute. Those CPUs are NOT idle, they are BUSY. You can clearly tell a 100MHz vs 500MHz thin client. My heretical view is 'don't try to prove how clever you are' make your thin clients robust and reliable. They just work. Now play with your server farm. 1st RAM then MPI (amongst your server farm). A grey system that works is a much better solution than a shiny one that is broken. Unless you have (say) 2G / 512M clients, trying to make babies work is the road to frustration. James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
