Building Your First Cluster?

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?"

Comments

Re:Well, uh...

[kimvette]

"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