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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."
Good. I hope this will convince CEOs in large companies that Linux clusters and scales better than Windows (well, that's obvious) or proprietary Unices. But the penguins can't be too confident, as Sun is up to no good here, hawking distributed clustering as a brand new technology when it certainly isn't, and catering to Fortune 500s and other large companies.
If we want to make our inroads we must do so now.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
I recently acquired 30 PCs in the Pentium-II range from a local community college, for free, as they were actually headed for the landfill.
Just as a weekend project, I was going to use the Beowulf software, but this CLIC software looks quite interesting, considering it's a total package and probably comes with the ease of use of Mandrake, so I'm going to give it a try.
All I have to do is get the PCs out of the shed, make a lot of CAT5 cables, format quite a few hd's with CLIC, and build my own Beo^H^H^HCLIC cluster out of crappy Pentium II's and do something stupid like calculate PI to a googol digits, even though my power bill will probably be insane.
Wish me luck, I'll keep you posted!
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!!! ;-)
:-)
Seriously though. How cool is Mandrake? First to LSB, full GPL'd version of cd avail for download (damn you SuSE!!), lots of freebies, like the Single network firewall and the old Corporate server(i loved this back in the day), their prosuite stomps any other distro (and for $135 without doc's!), oh and mandrake runs on XBox!!
Now a cluster??
My only complaint is they are an RPM-based distro and I like apt-get. Something like the freebsd ports collection would be nice too though, but i just hate those rpm's.
Just so you don't think I'm a linux leech I have bought 3 version of linux inlcuding mandrakes prosuite, i can't donate code but i can donate ca$h.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Check it out: Rocksclusters
I have lately started being more and more convinced that one of the key issues to success of open source - in a business sense, will be the fact that it is much easier for government organizations and other similar-type organizations to fund them without being guestioned and having put their moral in doubt. Why? Every single time that Microsoft, Adobe or some other closed source company is looking for government money, the politicians are facing a rather guestion: "In what light will this put us?"
Now, it would be interesting to see some years further and see how this all changes. I am convinced that there will much more public discussion on the subject whether this is discrimative against the non-open source companies. In my opinion it basicly is not, because being open source, it benefits everyone and not just a single company - but still, there's still someone who benefits most.