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Building Your First Cluster?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-been-a-while dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm interested in building a DIY cluster using Linux and will be using conventional Linux software. However, the number of possible ways to do this is huge. Aside from Beowulf, there's Mosix, OpenMosix, Kerrighed, Score, OpenSSI and countless others. Therein lies the problem. There are so many ways of clustering, development seems to be in fits and starts, most won't work on recent Linux kernels and there's no obvious way to mix-and-match. What have other people used? How good are the solutions out there?"

2 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well, uh... by kimvette · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "massively SMP" does not provide fault tolerance and does not eliminate certain bottlenecks such as disk I/O and network throughput, so if it's for an extremely high volume/high availability fileserver, mail server, or web server, massive SMP isn't going to cut it.

    Also, I'd go a render farm (if that's the task) if I had to choose between clustering and SMP, because if one node dies (depending on the managing application) the job just continues, whereas if it's on one single monster machine with no fault tolerance, if the job dies you often have to start rendering again from the beginning. Not fun.

    So let's back up and ask:

      1. What problem are you trying to solve?

      2. If it's a learning experience, try them all, take notes on which suit you best for tasks a, b, and c,

      3. What are your priorities

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  2. Re:Find the problem before trying to solve it by Fishbulb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cluster need special software to take advantage of the disturbed computing. They are built with a specific task in mind. Or do you already have a need and just failed to tell us?

    And specifically, is this a processing cluster or a failsafe cluster? I kind of assume a processing cluster, since that's what most people on slashdot refer to as a cluster, but in my experience most of the clusters out there are failsafe clusters ("5 9's" of service versus raw horsepower). Two rather different applications of clustering, requiring different design philosophy and sometimes different clustering applications.

    OB Mony Python ref:
    "I don't know what you mean, an african cluster or a euopean cluster?"