OK… I didn’t actually hear this quote today, but I thought it as I was sitting in our weekly departmental meeting…
“The less a user knows about the underpinnings of the cluster, the better”
Basically, what I am saying here is that users should just use the cluster for their work, and not mess with anything else unless told to. If they have a problem, they should provide a distinct request with as much information about the problem as they can, and if we identify what the problem is we come up with a solution that we provide to them, and they use that solution. They don’t need to know that there are some switches to MPI commands that might make their program run a bit faster, because most likely they are going to screw it up and cause bigger problems than they would possibly be solving.
