A New List For Clustering NetBSD

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project has created a new mailing list, tech-cluster. As the name suggests, this list is intended for technical discussions on building and using clusters of NetBSD hosts. Initially, this list is expected to be of low volume, but we hope to advocate and advance the use of NetBSD in such environments significantly. Subscription is via majordomo -- please see this page for details."

Comments

Re:Multiple Platforms

[Noryungi]

how viable it would be to run a cluster of various platforms, for example a couple of macPPC, x-86, and UltraSPARC computers running as a netBSD cluster. Would NetBSD be able to overcome these big platform differences?

Actually, yes. While I am not a specialist of NetBSD, it runs very well on all these machines -- I had a doubt about the UltraSPARC, then I read this.

The only thing that would be slightly different between these platforms would be the installation procedure, and even that procedure is fairly standardized.

Once the NetBSD system is installed ,everything should work exactly in the same way over all these platforms -- the only difference would be the device names and the name assigned to the network interfaces.

Please note that this type of cluster has been attempted before and it seems to work very well, albeit much more slowly than a high-performance (all Opteron, for instance) cluster.