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HPCC Expansion Summer 2015
We are in need to address the problem of tens of thousands of small serial jobs swarming across our larger servers. In doing so these jobs tie up large chunks of memory they do not use and interfere with the scheduling of large parallel jobs (small serial jobs satisfy job prerequisites easily).
So the idea is to assess what $50K could buy us in terms of large core density hardware (max cpu cores per U rack space) with small memory footprints (defined as 1 gb per physical core or less). Nodes can have tiny local disks for OS and local scratch (say 16-120 GB). /home may not be mounted on these systems so input and output files need to be managed by the jobs and copied back and forth using scp. The scheduler will be SLURM.
Some testing results can be found here:
