[torqueusers] building a department GPU cluster

[Roberto Nunnari]

Roberto Nunnari wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I'm writing to you to ask for advice or a hint to the right direction.
> 
> In our department, more and more researchers ask us (IT administrators) 
> to assemble (or to buy) GPGPU powered workstations to do parallel computing.
> 
> As I already manage a small CPU cluster (resources managed using SGE), 
> with my boss we talked about building a new GPU cluster. The problem is 
> that I have no experience at all with GPU clusters.
> 
> Apart from the already running GPU workstations, we already have some 
> new HW that looks promising to me as a starting point for temporary 
> building and testing a GPU cluster.
> 
> - 1x Dell PowerEdge R720
> - 1x Dell PowerEdge C410x
> - 1x NVIDIA M2090 PCIe x16
> - 1x NVIDIA iPASS Cable Kit
> 
> I'd be grateful if you could kindly give me some advice and/or hint to 
> the right direction.
> 
> In particular I'm interested on your opinion on:
> 1) is the above HW suitable for a small (2 to 4/6 GPUs) GPU cluster?
> 2) is torque suitable (or what should we use?) as a queuing and resource 
> management system? We would like the cluster to be usable by many users 
> at once in a way that no user has to worry about resources, just like we 
> do on the CPU cluster with SGE.
> 3) What distribution of linux would be more appropriate?
> 4) necessary stack of sw? (cuda, torque, hadoop?, other?)
> 
> Thank you very much for your valuable insight!
> 
> Best regards.
> Robi

Anybody on this, please?
Robi