On Sat, 7 Nov 2009, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
I have a 10 blade cluster of just hardware - I can install what I want, how I want. What options are there if I wanted to build the 10 blades as one large beast, but _NOT_ necessarily for someone doing grid-type work? Some users don't now how to program that way, but they'd like to have their program run on something that acts like a single processor, but a massive single processor with lots of memory. Some code is designed for a single, powerful workstation. I'd like this cluster to act as one powerful workstation.
I have had okay experiences with ScaleMPs vSMP software. Depending on workload it may or may not be good for your needs but it does work, however, you'll also need to ensure that the nodes are connected via a high speed interconnect like Infiniband. The vSMP system is based around a COMA architecture. As such some memory is reserved for caching to hide the latencies. We had issues with job affinities. Jobs would migrate from CPU to CPU frequently leading to rather poor performance. All of these findings were reported to them as we were an early adoptor.
While this can for for some of your jobs, I would advise that if you are looking to the long term, consider taking advantage of MPI, OpenMP or concurrent languages like Erlang. You'll be happier for it.