I run measurements on a cluster consisting of 32 nodes/machines. I do not require all nodes, only 4, for example. The problem is most of the time, the nodes are busy with other people running their heavy job on them. So, to find idle nodes to get good results, I run the top command on each machine starting from the first until I find 4 free ones.Is there a way to test the cpu load/utilisation on multiple machines at once and if possible, listing those machines that are less busy?
How to find which machines are idle on a cluster of many nodes
ssh;cpu;top;cluster
While @wnoise's answer is a the nicer solution, it might not be possible for you to implement it (i.e. do you administer the cluster?)... so, why not have a look atone of the 'cluster SSH' solutions @Chaleb mentioned here (pssh, pdsh, clusterssh, clusterit) orFabric (also mentioned in this thread, by @Crankyadmin)to gather usage statistics.Add a little scriptinga to evaluate the statistics you gathered on each host and you should be good to go.(a) depending on your preferences, one or another of the mentioned tools could be more handy, i.e. Fabric is a Python framework, so if you'd like to do the evaluation in Python, it might be well-suited (while any Perl/Bash/whatever scripting language is just as good).