I have tried to run with a single process (i.e. the entire grid is contained by one process) and the the command free -m on the compute node returns
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3913 1540 2372 0 49 1234 -/+ buffers/cache: 257 3656 Swap: 1983 0 1983 while top returns top - 16:01:09 up 4 days, 5:56, 1 user, load average: 0.53, 0.16, 0.10 Tasks: 63 total, 3 running, 60 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 49.4% us, 0.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 49.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 4007720k total, 1577968k used, 2429752k free, 50664k buffers Swap: 2031608k total, 0k used, 2031608k free, 1263844k cached