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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."
Gotcha!
I always figured the problem with a home supercomputer would be the electric bill. Am I wrong about that?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Great, now with my 15 386/486 systems sitting in the garage I can create something almost as powerful as this laptop I am currently using.
So when german hackers invade it will it surrender root access???
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!
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.
Now I can put those 8 486's to work and roughly have the power of a P2-300mhz and lower my heating bill all at once!
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.
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)