01-21-2009
So this problem used to be rather "simple". Just use some CPU metric (MPIS, FLOPS, SPECint, SPECfloat, whatever) and divide it by the cost of a computer. Then we had a clear choice: 2 CPUs per "1U" system. Now the choice has expanded to cores per chip and we have 2, 4, and even 8-way systems (AMD). You could build a rack of Sunx6400, each containing 64 cores. But we also shouldn't forget Sun's T1 processor line, with 128 "virtual" cores.
Further complicating the issue: cost is no longer just for the compute node. Now you have to consider the networking costs between them. 100 Mbit Ethernet switches are cheap, but may not be suitable for a cluster of very fast machines. Infiniband gives you great performance, but scaling is very expensive -- just the cabling alone can cost as much as your CPUs!
Further complications: the operating costs of cooling and electricity are not insignificant. For every watt used by the CPU, you can count on needing 2 watts to cool it (depends on the climate you're in). Thus, if every computer node requires 1.5 A, and you have 256 compute nodes, you will need 1.5 * 256 * 3 = 1152 Amps of power and maybe 2 30-ton chillers.
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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS
mrtg2pcp
MRTG2PCP(1) Performance Co-Pilot MRTG2PCP(1)
NAME
mrtg2pcp - Import mrtg data and create a PCP archive
SYNOPSIS
mrtg2pcp hostname devname timezone infile outfile
DESCRIPTION
mrtg2pcp is intended to read an MRTG log file as created by mrtg(1) and translate this into a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) archive with the
basename outfile. The hostname, devname, and timezone arguments specify information about the system for which the statistics were
gathered.
The resultant PCP achive may be used with all the PCP client tools to graph subsets of the data using pmchart(1), perform data reduction
and reporting, filter with the PCP inference engine pmie(1), etc.
A series of physical files will be created with the prefix outfile. These are outfile.0 (the performance data), outfile.meta (the metadata
that describes the performance data) and outfile.index (a temporal index to improve efficiency of replay operations for the archive). If
any of these files exists already, then mrtg2pcp will not overwrite them and will exit with an error message of the form
__pmLogNewFile: "blah.0" already exists, not over-written
mrtg2pcp is a Perl script that uses the PCP::LogImport Perl wrapper around the PCP libpcp_import library, and as such could be used as an
example to develop new tools to import other types of performance data and create PCP archives.
SEE ALSO
logimport(3), PCP::LogImport(3pm), pmchart(1), pmie(1) pmlogger(1).
3.8.10 Performance Co-Pilot MRTG2PCP(1)