As the Head Monkey around here, I often get questions sent to me about clusters. I thought it might make sense to share some of the questions (and answers). Please feel free to comment and offer your insights as well. Here is today's question.

Question: I am having trouble finding current information on hyper-threading and clusters, or even hyper-threading and heavy loads that is not at least 2 years out of date. I am about to overhaul our engineering cluster and would really like to find some information on the current state of things before I enable the HT ability on the cluster. Read on for my answer.

By the way, I'm open to other questions as well. Head on over to my contact page and drop me line. I'll also try an reach out to some of the more seasoned cluster jocks for answers as well. And finally, you can always post and search the adept Beowulf Mailing List. Oh, and try and keep the questions about HPC clusters.

Last fall, I had an opportunity to test the new quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5400 processor (Harpertown) processor. As the Harpertown was in short supply, I only had two nodes (two sockets on each node for total of 16 cores) with which to run my tests. I'm not picky, however, I like to run HPC tests as this type of data is absent in the mainstream press. In particular, I am most interested in how multi-core and MPI play in the HPC space. There is plenty to discuss, but for some interesting benchmark numbers, read on.

Back by popular demand, the ARC at Georgetown University has for some strange reason decided to offer my Intermediate Beowulf Administration and Optimization course for a second time this March (18th-20th). The details and background are on the ARC HPC Training Page. Class size is limited, so if you have interest, sign up early. Course description is below. Excellent donuts.

From the "I'll take eight department"

The Linux cluster world is moving towards InfiniBand for many reasons: bandwidth, latency, message rate, N/2, price/performance, and other factors that affect performance and price. But usually it's focused on larger systems, many times greater 64 nodes up to multiple thousand nodes. At that same time the reasons for moving to InfiniBand are still valid for smaller clusters, particularly performance, but the economics are not. Basically InfiniBand is just too expensive for smaller systems and usually does not make sense from a price/performance perspective. But that has just changed...