Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

BSD Clustering?

Posted by Cliff on from the things-to-look-for dept.

reidhoch asks: "My school would like to create a small cluster, we want to use BSD but can't think of any BSD clustering projects. We don't have the time and/or resources to start such a project either. If you know of any such ongoing projects, please enlighten me."

3 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. beowulf - think power requirements by bluGill · · Score: 2

    While in theory you can gather up enough junk 486s to make the top 500 list (assuming a lossly coupled problem), in practice the electrical cost would probably be greater then the cost of buying better machines. I suppose if everything worked on the first try, and you only had the system togather for a few minutes it wouldn't be that bad, but in the real world it won't work that well.

    Back when RC-56 looked like a 50 year problem at current rates someone suggested room fulls of 386s (a 486 was still useful if a bit slow). I calculated that you would be better off buyiung a ppro-200 (the fastest machine money could have at that time though ppc soon after got optimsed) and your savings on electrisity would pay for the innitial cost in less then a year. (This assuming you could get 386s for free, and you had to pay for the ppro, and you wanted the same key rate). The work of settup up that many computers was not factored in.

  2. Load balancing? by Rob+Kaper · · Score: 2
    You didn't mention the purpose of clustering, but if you want to use load balancing check out Zeus.

    Works on various Unices. It might be pricy for a school (no price available but I expect it will cost you) but you might at least want to try the free evaluation copy.

  3. BSD Cluster Info by elbuddha · · Score: 2

    These links were ripped straight from http://www.freebsd.org/~nik/advocacy/myths.html#cl ustering , and I haven't checked any of them out for myself for usefulness to your need. But here goes:

    http://www.sarnoff.com:8000/docs/metacomputing.h tml
    http://cubix.desy.de/General/bsd/bsd.html
    http://www.genebee.msu.su/Descript.html
    http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/workshops/Talks/Mikle r/mikler.html
    http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~pleiter/edv/unix .html
    http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~milind/MediaServers.h tml
    http://www.rwcp.or.jp/lab/pdslab/dist/
    http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/ClusterCookb ook/index.html