Re: determining host performance for task assignment

Here are my thoughts, 

The thing about performance for cpu servers is that it never really changes.
It does on some laptops when the power cord is unplugged, but we aren't
really going to unplug the cpu's intentionally :)

What may be more of a concern for a person starting a job (or a scheduler) is
how much load there is on a particular machine and how that load changes
with time. That said, how 'desirable' a cpu may be to run jobs on becomes an
equation of several factors, including CPU speed, total and available
memory, number of (compute) jobs running or scheduled to run there and the
current, perhaps 'expected' load of the system. (In a real HPC environment
the load should average 1 times #CPUs on the system).

MAUI (PBS too?) has what it calls a 'processor equivalent', or PE, which
is assigned by administrator when a system is configured in. It is used in
several of the formulas for calculating priorities and various execution
time penalties. I have been mulling on incorporating something similar,
but I want to involve more factors in calculating it, including bogomips,
flops or dhrystone and make it dynamically updated.

I haven't done it yet because I'm more concerned with making resfs report
policies (max jobs, users allowed, max wallclock time, etc.) which, afaik, no
other resource discovery system has.

cheers, andrey

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 [email protected] wrote:

> This has come up twice in the last several hours, so i figure
> i'll ask for opinions here.
> 
> To determine a dynamic task assignment to hosts, i'm using a
> /dev/perf that takes a simple 'calibrate x' command and reports
> (based on "x") (1) a "bogusmips" value which is just the result
> of a timed empty loop (2) a Dhrystone 2.1 value or (3) a Flops
> number. The timing is based on wallclock time to give a measure
> of system load.  I've glossed over some details.
> 
> This solution was thrown  together in a few minutes, and I don't think
> very much of it. How do people here do this ? How is it proposed to
> be done in 9grid (from reading the IPDPS paper I only grok
> that details like processor speed and amount of memory will be
> part of the information posted in /srv, or, via /dev/cputype). Thanks.
> 
> cheers,
> 
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