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Windows HPC 2008 appears to be restricted to one task per core.

Is there anyway to time share multiple tasks (or jobs) over a single core?

TownCube
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  • I believe the answer is *no*, but I'm trying to find a reference. The job scheduler will not let you assign two jobs to a single core. You can however create a job, say a batch file, that launches two programs which will then run on the core. – Chris S Jul 15 '11 at 12:42
  • Wouldn't a batch file still be executing the commands one at a time though? Even if it did spawn multiple processes simultaneously how could HPC stop them all when cancelling the job? – TownCube Jul 15 '11 at 12:49
  • You can use the `start` program to launch background processes from a batch file. It's really not a good solution, HPC wasn't meant to run this way. – Chris S Jul 15 '11 at 13:01
  • Hi Chris, I see your point and thanks for the suggestion however it isn't ideal as we'd like to get feedback on the progress of the job, if we just used `start` and spawn them all off the job would return instantly to HPC as "finished" while the processes were still running. We'd have to resort to using the Task Manager to keep track of them. I accept it's not designed to work this way so thanks for suggestion anyway. – TownCube Jul 15 '11 at 13:13

2 Answers2

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Thanks to joXn at Stack Overflow for this answer.

This feature is known as "Over-subscribe or under-subscribe core or socket counts on cluster nodes" and was released as part of HPC 2008 SP2 in June 2011.

Community
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TownCube
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At the server level if you don't have HPC 2008 R2 SP2 you may be able to enable hyperthreading on the nodes. The head node can assign then two tasks per core. IMO if your nodes are already running at 100% there's little point in doing this unless your cluster is configured for throughput rather than performance.

nick3216
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