Mandrake Announces Turn-Key Clustering Distribution

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."

Comments

Re:No SCSI

[benploni]

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.

Re:What kind of cluster?

[Havokmon]

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.