Most Windows PC labs around the country are severely underutilized. Despite the high cost of power consumption and management, average PC labs only uses about 10% of their total CPU utilization in a particular day. Meaning that 90% of the time, the CPU is just waiting and running some idle process that does nothing. Well, there is a solution at
http://www.grid-appliance.org
This Grid Appliance project you to turn a Windows PC lab into a Condor pool without interfering with normal lab use. Through the use of virtualization, this can be acheived without requiring any change to the infrastructure of the lab. And all this can be done effortlessly. Here is a list of projects/software that have made this possible.
- VMware (www.vmware.com)
- Condor (www.cs.wisc.edu/condor)
- IP-over P2P (www.ipop-project.org)
If any of the links above are not clear enough on how this is possible, simple reply to this post and I will be glad to provide more details.
Enjoy
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if it is practical to install vmware on all my office machines (they're all running Windows XP), put redhat/centos on it and then setup Cadence distributed processing on it. Will this slow down the Window's users when a spectre simulation is running?
Regards,
I am not completely sure on how Cadence distributed processing works, but if it's possible to run Cadence on top of Condor, then it would become practical because we have a tool called the GridMonitorTool that monitors Window users activity. When users are using the computer, Condor would stop the Cadence distributed processing job, and it would not interfere with Window's users.
ReplyDeleteHope that help, feel free to comment if you have any more questions.