Wanted: Turn-Key 10-Node Beowulf Cluster

forgotten password writes: "I'd just started working on my morning M&Ms, when I was asked where my group can buy a good turn-key ~2CPUx10-node Beowulf cluster in two hours. I suspect the time frame is longer than that, although the window-of-opportunity for the money is apparently on the order of days, and a quote before the procurement meeting would help. Any ideas? Who's good? What it should cost? Thanks!" If you're quick, maybe you can become the world's newest manufacturer of custom beowulf clusters.

Comments

Atipa

[p14-lda]

Clemson University purchased a setup w/ 512 nodes from Atipa, they delivered it onsite. Can't beat that. Call 888-222-7822, and ask for Bret, tell him the PARL sent you

Re:Atipa

[Dyelar]

Be warned, Atipa was recently bought by MicroTech computers, and they are sometimes known for not being very good about support, or providing decent equipment. I know that Microtech fired a whole bunch of the Atipa employees though. Before this though, Atipa was looking very good.

If you are interested, SGI can sell you turn key beowulf solutions also. You can also go to http://www.beowulf.org and they have a list of commercial companies that provide beowulf clustering solutions.

Re:Atipa

[Andrewkov]

I tried calling, I think his phone number is slashdotted..

Western Scientific ...

[Bob(TM)]

... will sell you one.

Price depends on bells and whistles, but the 8 node, dual processor P-III system we got with SCI cards ran around $35K.

http://www.wsm.com

If I remember my Beowulf correctly...

[Slashdolt]

It should cost an arm, but not necessarily a leg.

Beowulf Site (www.beowulf-underground.org)

[p14-lda]

Check out www.beowulf-underground.org That is the place for everything beowulf. It is run by the guys in the Parallel Architecture Research Lab at Clemson University.

Vendors

[PenguinX]

Penguin Computing ships beowulf clusters

IBMdoes a lot of linux stuff, they even have beowulf traning classes - I imagine that they have some turnkey solution.

Compaq sells 'em. too.

In other words, almost any company that sells Linux servers sells beowulf clusters o' servers as well. And if you want training, quite a few of them out there have classes for it too :)

Don't forget Scyld.

[pi_rules]

Check out Scyld [scyld.com]. If I'm not mistaken Donald Becker (one of the founders of Beowulf) is the head of the company ... or at least has something to do with it.

Re:What do you run on the darn thing ?

[cr0sh]

Most of the apps for Beowulf clusters tend to be scientifically oriented apps. It really comes down to there being only certain kinds of problems that can be broken down into parallel processes that can be executed concurently, then the answers "recombined" at the end to get the result.

IIRC, Mosix allows for using the machine as one large machine, essentially allowing each process (or groups of processes) a single CPU, but funneling the result back to the main controller, so to the user, it looks like one large machine. This is different from a standard parallel processing Beowulf cluster, which behave like classical parallel processing machines.

For that domain (parallel processing), aside from coding your own stuff (hard to due, even if you are a master coder, from what I understand - due to having to understand what classes of problems can be broken down into parallel tasks, and then actually applying that knowledge to real tasks), there is one application that would prove to be "fun" - Ray Tracing.

Fortunately, POVRay has a paralleled version available, for Beowulf clusters. I don't have a link, but I know it exists (heck, you can probably get it at the POVRay site).

One other disclaimer: Everything I have said should be interpreted as "coming out my ass", simply because I have no experience at building or using Beowulf clusters or any other parallel processing architectures. Most of what I know about them have come from /. discussions, various web sites of Beowulf cluster projects, books, and magazine articles (as well as one funky book I picked up at the library detailing programming in Fortran for a Connection Machine - eeepp!). The POVRay stuff is true, though...

off topic: instability, windows and science

[nels_tomlinson]

Your sig line mentioned that someone should do a paper on windows instability. Here is one of them. It's the third in a series.

One portion which shocked me was:

Our final piece of analysis concerns operating system crashes. Occasionally, during our UNIX study, tests resulted in OS crashes. During this Windows NT study, the operating system remained solid and did not crash as a result of testing. We should note, however, that an early version of the fuzz tool for Windows NT did result in occasional OS crashes. The tool contained a bug that generated mouse events only in the top left corner of the screen. For some reason, these events would occasionally crash Windows NT 4.0, although not in a repeatable fashion.

They crashed a unix os? Wow! That doesn't match up with my limited experience. The only way I've ever done that was by trying to do stupid things as root, like running mindi with a buggy kernel. I wouldn't have thought that this would be a problem for a normal user.

Here is something which didn't surprise me at all:

Our 1995 study found that applications based on open source had better reliability than those of the commercial vendors. Following that study, we noted a subsequent overall improvement in software reliability (by our measure). But, as long as vendors and, more importantly, purchasers value features over reliability, our hope for more reliable applications remains muted.

Mine, too.

Re:What do you run on the darn thing ?

[duffbeer703]

No shit sherlock.

The guy knows what a Beowulf does, he needs somebody to BUILD one for him.

Goddamn karma whore.