RE: Distributive

From: Lars.Lindbom@farmbio.uu.se (Lars Lindbom) Subject: [NMusers] RE: Distributive Computing Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 12:06:39 +0100 (IST) We are currently using a Linux-cluster to run multiple nonmem jobs in parallel. The cluster is based on MOSIX, a patch or add-on to the Linux kernel that enables automatic process migration. Start a job on one cluster-node and it will move to the best node available. Best means highest CPU-speed, most RAM and of course lowest load. There are many pro's and con's with this system and you can read all about them on www.mosix.org but the most important are: - Long nonmem jobs will benfit the most; they will migrate to the fastest node and stay there. - You can write parallel applications that utilise the process migration of MOSIX but multithreaded shared-memory applications will not. They will stay on the node on which they were started. - The setting up and maintainance of a MOSIX cluster demands some knowledge about Linux administration. /Lars Below is the ouput from top, run on our main node just now: 2:03pm up 17 days, 21:09, 16 users, load average: 3.89, 3.74, 3.38 114 processes: 108 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 1 stopped CPU states: 1297.3% user, 0.7% system, 506.1% nice, 0.0% idle Mem: 512144K av, 503800K used, 8344K free, 0K shrd, 21680K buff Swap: 1052216K av, 88K used, 1052128K free 309904K cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT N# %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 2294 ----- 18 0 3412 3412 328 S 7 99.9 0.6 5463m nonmem 32222 ----- 19 19 3624 3624 520 S N 6 99.9 0.7 4494m nonmem 21438 ----- 11 0 1852 1852 284 S 3 99.9 0.3 1574m nonmem 17654 ----- 17 0 2488 2488 324 S 5 99.8 0.4 10527m nonmem 21769 ----- 18 0 3600 3600 528 S 5 99.8 0.7 7769m nonmem 727 ----- 10 0 1340 1340 4 S 6 99.8 0.2 5772m nonmem 20898 ----- 10 0 3216 3216 276 S 2 99.8 0.6 2218m nonmem6 22952 ----- 17 0 2356 2356 352 R 0 96.9 0.4 1046m nonmem 25028 ----- 14 0 2996 2996 860 R 0 93.7 0.5 11:44 nonmem 21736 ----- 19 19 2368 2368 336 S N 4 83.6 0.4 1187m nonmem 2314 ----- 19 19 3436 3436 464 S N 4 65.7 0.6 5400m nonmem 22460 ----- 19 19 2720 2720 376 S N 4 50.3 0.5 959:00 nonmem 22292 ----- 19 19 3408 3408 504 S N 3 49.9 0.6 1048m nonmem 24352 ----- 19 19 1868 1868 400 S N 3 49.9 0.3 66:39 nonmem 2275 ----- 19 19 2756 2756 428 S N 2 49.5 0.5 5032m nonmem 2262 ----- 19 19 3236 3236 348 S N 2 49.3 0.6 4506m nonmem 23836 ----- 19 19 2728 2728 488 R N 0 8.0 0.5 109:07 nonmem 24961 root 10 0 1108 1108 872 R 0 0.7 0.2 0:09 mtop 15 root 9 0 0 0 0 R 0 0.1 0.0 7:12 memsorter 1 root 9 0 544 544 472 S 0 0.0 0.1 0:26 init 2 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd -- Lars Lindbom PhD-student Division of Pharmacokinetics and Drug Therapy Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences Box 591 SE-751 24 Uppsala Sweden Phone +46 18 471 4291 Fax +46 18 471 4003 email Lars.Lindbom@farmbio.uu.se