Can I emulate MS Compute Cluster Server on my dev machine?

Question

I have a project for a client that will consist of managing jobs on a MS Compute Cluster. I will be developing the application outside of their network, and would like a way to develop/debug my app without the need to be on their network.

I am developing the app in C#, and all I have so far is the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack SDK.

Answer 1

The webcast was helpful, in that it lead me to the MPI.Net API. MPI.Net will allow me to write an executable that can be launched via mpiexec.exe, and can manage the process of creating and monitoring parallel tasks. From what I understand, the head node in the cluster will automatically delegate each task to the appropriate compute nodes for me.

Since mpiexec.exe ships with the ComputeCluster SDK, and will run on my multi core dev machine, this may be close enough to cluster emulation for me to get my job done.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 2

Depending on the "beefyness" of your development machine, you could set up a local cluster relatively easily using HyperV. You aren't going to see the productivity gains of an actual cluster/actual hardware, but for management tools such as you are trying to build it should work fine. A commodity box with 4-8 GB of ram should do nicely to create a head node and two child nodes for dev/test.