Support nodes

[jeeves]

Hi,

Is there a rule of thumb for determining the no of support nodes required for a Thor cluster?

Would 1 support node be sufficient for a 10 node Thor cluster processing around 3 TB of data?

Thanks,
-David

[rtaylor]

David,

Would 1 support node be sufficient for a 10 node Thor cluster processing around 3 TB of data?

Probably, depending on how much continuous work you're doing with the system. For production systems it is good to have separation, even if that separation is achieved by having the infrastructure run in separate VMs on the same box.

For example, in our production environments we usually keep each support process (Dali, DFU Server, etc.) on it's own "box" (which may be physical or virtual, depending on the environment) for separation of duties and fastest performance. In some cases we have multiple servers setup for each of the support services. So we may have as many as 15-20 actual support nodes working to support a single HPCC environment containing multiple 400-node clusters and any number of additional clusters of other various sizes (200-node, 100-node, 50-node, etc.). This is how we daily deal with the multiple Petabytes of data that we work with.

HTH,

Richard

[jeeves]

Richard,

Thanks for the answer. It helped.

Thanks,
-David