What’s in Your Cluster?

Information about high-performance computing (HPC) cluster use is hard to find. Not only is the market for such systems relatively small, but clusters are often home-grown creations that fly under the radar screens of traditional market watchers.

How then can one find information on clusters? This very question prompted me to place small, single-question polls on the ClusterWorld.com web site over the last two years (see www.clusterworld.com/pollBooth.pl). The polls were entirely unscientific: a respondent could easily defeat the “one browser, one vote” rule by removing a cookie, and there were no demographics on the population of respondents. And while each poll had a minimum of 100 responses, the surveys nonetheless yielded some nuggets of information.

High-performance computing professionals often hear about a big (or really big) cluster and the machine’s ranking on the “Top 500” (http:// www.Top 500.org) list. Many believe that the Top 500 is really a “high tech pissing contest.” If you read the press releases, the list is certainly used that way.

To see just how relevant the Top 500 is to most cluster users, look at Figure One, where respondents were asked about cluster size. The most interesting result is the fact that clusters consisting of 32 nodes or less accounted for over 50 percent of all the systems represented in the survey.