As a cloud provider, this rule isn't too onerous as there is always a way to get dedicated machines through sole tenant offerings and simply using large VMs (although it is a waste of $$ to use clients that have 60+ cores just to run a single benchmark process).

I'm more curious about the thinking here, can someone from the committee provide some background?  This is one of those funny and rare cases where we are worried about someone with fewer resources having an advantage over someone with more resources.  If a system with a 1 or 2 clients can beat 10...isn't that one measure of success from an HPC point of view?

Dean

On 9/30/19 9:10 AM, John Bent via IO-500 wrote:

To IO500 Community,


The committee has received some queries about the rules concerning virtual machines for the 10 Node Challenge. As such, the committee has added the following rule:


13. For the 10 Node Challenge, there must be exactly 10 physical nodes for client processes and at least one benchmark process must run on each

  1. Virtual machines can be used but the above rule must be followed. More than one virtual machine can be run on each physical node.


Although we recognize that this may disadvantage cloud architectures, we do want to stress that this rule only applies to the 10 Node Challenge. The committee did feel it was important to add this rule to ensure that the 10 Node Challenge sublist offers the maximum potential for fair comparisons by ensuring equivalent client hardware quantities. Submissions with any number/combination of virtual and physical machines can of course always be submitted to the full list.



Thank you,


The IO500 Committee



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