Cluster of Nodes

As its name implies, the CRE is intended to operate in a Sun HPC cluster--that is, in a collection of Sun SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) servers that are interconnected by any Sun-supported, TCP/IP-capable interconnect. An SMP attached to the cluster network is referred to as a node.

The CRE manages the launching and execution of both serial and parallel jobs on the cluster nodes. For serial jobs, its chief contribution is to perform load balancing in shared partitions, where multiple processes can be competing for the same node resources. For parallel jobs, the CRE provides:

• A single job monitoring and control point.

• Load balancing for shared partitions.

• Information about node connectivity.

• Support for spawning of MPI processes.

• Support for Prism interaction with parallel jobs.

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  Note -

  A cluster can consist of a single Sun SMP server. However, executing MPI jobs on even a single-node cluster requires the CRE to be running on that cluster.

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The CRE supports parallel jobs running on clusters of up to 64 nodes containing up to 256 CPUs.