With beowulfes getting ever bigger, the issue faced by administrators of these beasts are very much related to management. By chance, some projects answer this issue, as BLD (free, Berkeley Lab) or ALINKARAISIN (commercial) and ALINKA LCM (GPL), but there are still things to be done. Moreover, once you have overcome the software management, you still have to deal with the hardware (of these 1000 fans, one _has_ to fail...). Still, the hardest job is not for the administrators: users have to actually write good parallel code... and this is no piece of cake.
My questions are: 1) Have I missed any other serious competitor in the cluster field?
You sure want to try the newly released GPL program ALINKA LCM to do the management and configuration of Linux beowulf-type clusters. Once installed, the software can automatically setup from the network a beowulf cluster (with or without using the hard disks) within 2 minutes. With this software, it is dead easy to build an "instant beowulf" cluster... The current version is 1.1.3 and can be considered as a beta release, although some sites use ALINKA LCM v1.1.3 in production. If you wish to know more about ALINKA LCM, you can read the on-line documentation here . ALINKA provides software tools for commodity clusters running Linux since August 1999. Customers of ALINKA include the French CEA (Center of Atomic Energy) and public research laboratories. The ALINKA company provides commercial support for ALINKA LCM and also sells a GUI for ALINKA LCM, called ALINKA RAISIN, running within a web browser. You can check http://www.alinka.com for more information on this new killer software !
Bull was at the Linux Expo in Paris Thursday and Friday. They announced their plans to support Linux Thursday morning at the expo. They will only have support for the Intel platform. They say they can help you with any problem you could have running free software... Their booth was about 1/3 of the size of HP's or Compaq's. (But they were giving away Ice Creams, so I guess it's OK:-) )
Slashdot Mirror
With beowulfes getting ever bigger, the issue faced by administrators of these beasts are very much related to management.
By chance, some projects answer this issue, as BLD (free, Berkeley Lab) or ALINKA RAISIN (commercial) and ALINKA LCM (GPL), but there are still things to be done. Moreover, once you have overcome the software management, you still have to deal with the hardware (of these 1000 fans, one _has_ to fail...).
Still, the hardest job is not for the administrators: users have to actually write good parallel code... and this is no piece of cake.
My questions are:
1) Have I missed any other serious competitor in the cluster field?
You sure want to try the newly released GPL program ALINKA LCM to do the management and configuration of Linux beowulf-type clusters.
Once installed, the software can automatically setup from the network a beowulf cluster (with or without using the hard disks) within 2 minutes. With this software, it is dead easy to build an "instant beowulf" cluster...
The current version is 1.1.3 and can be considered as a beta release, although some sites use ALINKA LCM v1.1.3 in production. If you wish to know more about ALINKA LCM, you can read the on-line documentation here . ALINKA provides software tools for commodity clusters running Linux since August 1999. Customers of ALINKA include the French CEA (Center of Atomic Energy) and public research laboratories.
The ALINKA company provides commercial support for ALINKA LCM and also sells a GUI for ALINKA LCM, called ALINKA RAISIN, running within a web browser.
You can check http://www.alinka.com for more information on this new killer software !
Bull was at the Linux Expo in Paris Thursday and Friday. ... :-) )
They announced their plans to support Linux Thursday morning at the expo. They will only have support for the Intel platform. They say they can help you with any problem you could have running free software
Their booth was about 1/3 of the size of HP's or Compaq's. (But they were giving away Ice Creams, so I guess it's OK