Question on the state of the art in cluster management: Approximately what level of dedicated support do folks on this list have / wish you have for your clusters? Obviously, there are a lot of free variables, including but not limited to: * Does the support person also do development, parallelization, or otherwise *use* the cluster? * Do their other responsibilities come from the IT side or the research side (i.e: Are we dedicating half of a unix admin, or half of a postdoc?) * How many users are being supported, and to what level? Setting aside these and similar details that would make for valid, comparable numbers, my gut feel is that a reasonable guess is one half time IT person for the first fifty nodes or so. I think it scales logarithmically from there: So, go up to an entire full time person for 50 - 150, and add support staff incrementally as the cluster becomes more huge. -Chris Dwan