Compaq Offers Free Beowulf Test Drives

waite writes "The Compaq Testdrive program is now making available a Beowulf cluster of XP1000s running Alpha Linux. If you sign up for the testdrive program you can register for an account on the cluster to try out your applications in this cluster environment. There is no charge for this program. Compaq is making this available to Open Source developers. No strings, catches, or hooks of any type."

Comments

How tweaked are we talking?

[Darlok]

Does anyone know what scheduler / load balancer / etc etc etc that they're using? As of roughly 6 months ago, getting a Beowulf to be tuned enough to actually show significant performance increases compared to manually firing off independent processes on each machine was extraordinarily difficult. I never actually managed it.

We had a small cluster of Alpha PC164's and a much larger of Pentiums. We "upgraded" from a Beowulf-style system to a Mosix system, and performance shot straight through the roof. Unfortunately, Mosix doesn't run on Alphas (yet), so we bit the bullet on 'em and have a bunch of glorified paperweights.

I'd love to get back on the Linux train with the Alphas, but Beowulf seemed to have too many if's and require far more effort than it returned benefits. Has this changed, and how?