Load Management and File System in Heterogeneous Environment

Why is heterogenous important? Today, supercomputer is less dominant in high performance computing than before. Clusters become more dominant systems than supercomputer in high performance computing. The reason of this migration is primarily economics. Single high performance supercomputer is even expensive than several inter-connected computers. Although the performance of supercomputers are better than clusters, the performance per price is reverse. For example, in 1993 Beowulf Project, 16 node 1 GFlops $ 40,000 cluster was built from Intel 486 computers.[1] At first, cluster systems was mainly consisted of homogeneous machines. However, To achieve high performance, different kinds of machine should be able to used. Because the performance of applications are vary from OSs to OSs and machines to machines. Since cluster system is a set of machines, the demand for using different OSs and types of machines will be increased. Moreover, if the demand were increased, adding another machine to current stable systems is preferrable choice unless current system are totally useless for the demand. In this case, the new machine will be different from the component of current systems with high probability. So, I expect the demand for heterogeneity is very high.