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Mandrake Announces Turn-Key Clustering Distribution

Posted by timothy on from the clic-and-run dept.

joestar writes "According to their website, Mandrake and partners (Bull, INPG/INRIA...) have launched an 'easy-to-deploy easy-to-use Linux Clustering solution,' that has already been tested on a 40-node cluster. Of course, it's published under the GPL, comes with parallel applications, and is available for download as an ISO. It seems the project is financed by French government. It's great because I've always dreamed of having my own supercomputer at home."

5 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No SCSI by benploni · · Score: 5, Informative

    You've obviously never built a real computational cluster. Real cluster nodes are better off not having any drives at *all*, as they are the only moving part in the mix. It boots PXE, loads a kernel, and nfs mounts root.

  2. Re:No SCSI by imann · · Score: 4, Informative

    i'm following this project, and the SCSI port is running and will be available soon :-)

  3. Urpmi parallel by imann · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm on the mailing list of this project and there was a parallel feature for urpmi that really rox !

    This tool allow people to deploy RPMS to a group of linux hosts using an intelligent parallel copy.

    How does it works:
    You create a group of hosts so the server can ask the nodes (using urpmi) to prepare for an update/install of packages.
    Each computer tell the server the packages it needs then the server copy in parallel (using ka-tools) the rpms on the nodes (that's very fast even for a hudge number of nodes).After that, nodes update their system using local rpms !
    This feature seems to be designed for clusters but should be used by admins !

    Another point of comparaison between urpmi & apt-get

  4. Re:What kind of cluster? by Havokmon · · Score: 5, Informative
    When I think of clusters, I think of the active-passive Win2K database server we have at our co-location facility. It requires special cluster-aware hardware (e.g. the disk array) and cluster aware software (e.g. Win2K AS, SQL Server). I get the impression from people's comments that this is a different type of cluster. Rather than being about high availability, it is about massive parallel computing. Is this a correct assessment?

    Right. Netware 6 has kick-ass "clustering" that allows a Server to go down, and a 2nd server to beome your file server. You can stream a video (from FILE), down a server, and after a second, your stream will continue - from the 2nd server.

    Most of us call that failover, but Microsoft and Novell are calling it clustering.

    --
    "I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
  5. NOPE! by bhsx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mandrake is compiled for i586, so you're gonna have to at least drop a pentium in to those old mobos...

    --
    put the what in the where?