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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Hello
&#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Just
discovered the StarCluster system, and enjoyed looking through the site.&nbsp;
Looks like a very well thought out design.&nbsp; Hope to try it sometime in the
near future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>At
Insilicos (<a href="http://www.insilicos.com">www.insilicos.com</a>) we have
built a similar platform for parallel computing in the AWS cloud.&nbsp; Like
StarCluster, it uses MPI for internode communication.&nbsp; We&#8217;re curious
how reliable MPI has been for you.&nbsp; Occasionally, we have problems bringing
up a cluster because mpdboot fails to establish a communications ring.&nbsp; It&#8217;s
pretty clear this is due to higher than usual latency between nodes.&nbsp; We take
the obvious precaution of making sure all nodes are provisioned in the same availability
zone, and have even tweaked the timeout tolerances inside mpdboot.py, but there
are still sporadic bad days when the problem occurs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Anything
you can share on your history (or lack thereof) with this problem, and
approaches to resolving it, would be much appreciated.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Regards,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Jeff
Howbert<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

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