Comments on: The Beowulf Questions http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7213/ Open Source, Open Standards Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:48:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: cwtryon http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7213/#comment-6016 cwtryon Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7213/#comment-6016 <i>Will my program run faster?</i><br /> <br /> I think the answer to that should be, "It depends." You are correct that, given a single program running in isolation, it probably won't run any faster. It might even be a little slower, given the overhead of more software layers between you and the hardware. <b>However</b>, if it is a compute intensive program, an you want to run <i>ten</i> independent instances of that program at the same time (for example, rendering frames in an animated "Beowulf" movie), then the bunch of them will probably run a lot faster on a cluster than they would running serially on a single CPU. Will my program run faster?

I think the answer to that should be, “It depends.” You are correct that, given a single program running in isolation, it probably won’t run any faster. It might even be a little slower, given the overhead of more software layers between you and the hardware. However, if it is a compute intensive program, an you want to run ten independent instances of that program at the same time (for example, rendering frames in an animated “Beowulf” movie), then the bunch of them will probably run a lot faster on a cluster than they would running serially on a single CPU.

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