SMP/HTT and Beowulf cluster on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

[Kris Kennaway]

Michael Stogsdill wrote:
> Hey, I have a question that I can't seem to find a decent answer to. The mailing lists have had some similar topics, but they were mostly for the 6.x-RELEASE and other minor differences. 
> 
> Heres my situation; I'm trying to create a beowulf cluster running FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE consisting of 8 systems all running on Dual Xeon w/HTT both running at 2.8Gz. What exactly this system will be doing I can't say, so lets just think about the performance of the cluster running a benchmarking tool similar to sysbench. Because they are dual processor systems, I will be using the SMP kernel already, so I'm wondering if turning on HTT will help or hinder my Beowulf' performance. The cluster is not yet operational, otherwise I would do some tests myself!

The answer is always "HTT performance depends on your workload.  Try it 
and see if it helps".

Kris