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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?"

3 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Don't sweat it ... by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Funny

    Try them all. After all, you just KNOW your first one's going to be a clusterf*ck.

    Seriously, if you're going to take that route, you really should be prepared to invest the time in test-driving several different solutions.

  2. Rocks by corvair2k1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Rocks is a great tool to build a cluster. It includes lots of monitoring tools and such, so you can see the status of nodes, etc. However, I'm not quite sure how large you're planning on going... May be overkill for a 4-noder. =)

  3. Re:Whatever happened to... by sophanes · · Score: 5, Informative

    While a few early parallel computers used hypercube based interconnects (eg, CM-1), there hasn't been a lot of interest in hypercubes since then. The advantage of hypercubes is that their diameter only increases logarithmically with the number of nodes in the network. Their disadvantage is that the node degree increases with the dimension, meaning that each node must be configured with sufficient ports to support the maximum dimensionality of the network -- making hypercube-based networks either expensive or non growable. (This can be solved to an extent by using cube-connected cycles.)