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Check this out, some actaully is offering a course on Beowulf Administration.

We build turn-key Beowulf systems for a living. You may want to consult:

Beowulf.org

Beowulf FAQ

Beowulf Underground

Beowulf Quick Start

In addition, you may want to contact us directly about helping you convince your management that turn-key and supportable Linux Beowulf Clusters are available and do useful things. Take a look at our success stories.

Doug Eadline,
deadline@plogic.com
Paralogic, Inc.

We build turn-key Beowulf systems for a living. You may want to consult:

Beowulf.org

Beowulf FAQ

Beowulf Underground

Beowulf Quick Start

In addition, you may want to contact us directly about helping you convince your management that turn-key and supportable Linux Beowulf Clusters are available and do useful things. Take a look at our success stories.

Doug Eadline,
deadline@plogic.com
Paralogic, Inc.

We build turn-key Beowulf systems for a living. You may want to consult:

Beowulf.org

Beowulf FAQ

Beowulf Underground

Beowulf Quick Start

In addition, you may want to contact us directly about helping you convince your management that turn-key and supportable Linux Beowulf Clusters are available and do useful things. Take a look at our success stories.

Doug Eadline,
deadline@plogic.com
Paralogic, Inc.

BERT is not ment to replace a good programmer. It is intended to help a good programmer. While BERT does do as much automatic processing as possible, it's design allows the user to direct BERT during a highly interactive conversion process. Indeed, BERT optimizes parameters that are almost impossible for "humans" to do in their head (at least in any resonable amount of time).

I could go on ... but, I am on the floor of SC99 demostrating BERT!

Doug Eadline

Xtreme Machines

I just read the article. As a manufacturer of "turn-key" Beowulf systems, here was my reply to the author:

Stephen,

I just read your story about Beowulf systems. While the story was well written and informative, there are some points that you have missed.

1) The definition of a Beowulf requires and "open source" OS (See "How to Build a Beowulf" by Sterling, Becker, Salmon, Savarese) Therefore, systems built from True 64 are NOT Beowulf systems.

2) You missed my company, Paralogic Inc. We sell turnkey Beowulf systems. In fact rather than "several" as reported by IBM, we have several dozens of installed production systems at companies like Lucent, Amerada Hess, Conoco, Procter and Gamble, government sites like NASA, NRL, and the Air Force, and many Universities. (see www.xtreme-machines.com)

3) There is a rather huge barrier to entry because of the technical nature of these machines. As far as I know, we are the only company who will offer support for Beowulf clusters. Without support the market can never enter the mainstream.

4) There have been quite a few other people who contributed quite a lot of effort to the Beowulf technology other than IBM and VA Linux. Although all contributions are welcome, these guys are a little late to the party and we hope they stay.

Sincerely

Douglas Eadline, Ph.D.
President

Paralogic, Inc.
PEAK PARALLEL PERFORMANCE

The Extreme Linux CD and most of the RPMs it contains are woefully out of date. The EL CD has a hacked RH 5.0 install with some kernel modifications, none of which are really necessary. Most clusters are being moved to 2.2.x kernels (for network and SMP reasons) and at least the channel bonding modifications have been moved to 2.2. My 24-node cluster is running 2.2.3 which I hand patched with the TCP_NoDelay and Channel Bonding modifications.

If you are serious about getting a cluster running, take a look at:

http://www.xtreme-machines.com/x-cluster-qs.html

This is very up-to-date and basically begins by advising you to use your EL CD as a coaster.

Mike Prinkey

Here are some cool links:

Beowulf Underground


Extreme Machines