Ask Slashdot: "Be" is for Beowulf?

PhiberOptik asks: "Considering that BeOS is so adept at handling high I/O and network bandwidth, whould it make a good OS for a Beowulf cluster? I know that since BeOS is not open-source it would be harder to have applications made, but they would be easier to maintain; as BeOS has a standard set. Any ideas?" Could this be done? What OS characteristics are necessary for a Beowulf cluster?

Comments

PVM and MPI (Re: First Post!)

[pabs]

Beowulf clustered applications (along with COWs and many other distributed systems) are developed using mainly MPI or p-threads. There is almost no good reason to use PVM except to support legacy code.

And of the two, MPI is generally vastly superior to p-threads because (IIRC) MPI is a higher level implementation which provides communication routines that are optimized for each particular hardware implementation (depending on the version/implementation of MPI). For example,
the actual implementation of MPI_Reduce() will vary depending on whether the nodes are in a shared/non-shared memory environment -- in a non-shared environment (eg. a Beowulf cluster), MPI uses a tree-method in order to distribute the data among the nodes in parallel.

Anyways, the point is that MPI is really just a communications specification (Message Passing Interface) with language bindings (C and Fortran). What you really want is a set of client/server daemons that _implement_ MPI.

Okay, I'm done with the conch now.

Yes/No

[EngrBohn]

Technically, you could not build a Beowulf from BeOS -- the definition that Don Becker, Tom Sterling, et.al., provide for "What is a Beowulf?" is that it must have a free OS (Linux, *BSD, other) so that, if need be, optimizations to the OS can be made.
That said, there's no reason you couldn't set up a "Cluster of Workstations" (COW) which is basically what you're thinking of -- it's been done with Solaris, NT, ... The limiting factor is getting interprocess communication libraries.
Christopher A. Bohn

Be's networking isn't all that

[k8to]

Given that Be's networking performance is yet to come close to Linux's, and that Beowulf traditionally uses TCP/IP for their implementation of MPI, etc., I can't see Be being a stellar Beowulf performer at this point.

I also don't see why you need to have a "single set" of software for an OS for use with Beowulf. I'd think you could handle installing the same software in your given cluster, and I don't know of software for Beowulf that people are wanting to distribute in a binary-only fashion. Do such beasts exist?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Be fan, and I run it on my home box for weeks (sometimes while doing Linux technical support ;), but I don't see how it would be even as good as Linux for Beowulf purposes.

That's not what most BeOS developers say

[agtofchaos]

"I know that since BeOS is not open-source it would be harder to have applications made"

What makes you think that open-source software is any easier to develop? Be has documented the entire BeOS API and provides tons of sample code on every CD they sell. If you subscribe to the Be developer newsletter then they usually send more sample code plus tutorials in every issue. Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-linux. I do question the logic behind GPL'ing apps all the time. As a person trying to learn C++, I want to be able to make money off of the app itself... not supporting it. OSS has its place, and it is definitely got an impressive list of apps. However we need moderation because an all OSS world is no different than an all closed source world.