Hi,

Surely you can build a cluster in one month. It's not difficult at all.

The difficult question to answer is what you want to do with the cluster. Two things come to mind.

1. Running lots of indendent programs with lots of data. So things like load balancing is helpful available in mosix/openmosix. Note that this includes running 100 seti@home clients, running povray to render scenes to make a good quality movie, running crack with different dictionaries, etc.

2. Have a parallel application(s) (based on MPI/PVM) that need lot of CPU time. This includes running parallel FEM/CFD solver. Or running distributed system components to build a powerful system. This includes building a network storage out of individual 40GBs on each node.

(If there are more categories of application, someone can point out to me.)

Either category of softwares can be run on a bunch of workstations with some scripting. NO NEED to build a cluster. (Unless you are restricting the meaning of the word cluster to bunch of PCs connected on a network)

openmosix offers one of the important features of SSI (single system image) which is load balancing. Beowulf/OSCAR offer tools to install software (could be OS, apps, clustering components) on 1000 nodes without much effort.

What's the point of all this blurb? To reiterate: it does not take much time to build a cluster. Collect PCs, connect on the network, install some GNU/Linux os, install openmosix on all of them and voila! You have cluster ready. Important thing comes only after that. Developing good parallel applications (parallel code or parallel data) which can make use of the cluster you have built.

Amitay.

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 06:48, Charudatt Mulye wrote:

Hi ,

I ws very much dependent on the O'reily book 'Building Linux Cluster' and now realizing tht the book is good starting point but far from its promised goal of building a cluster.

I heard that -Amitay , Jaju u hv implemented the linux cluster. First of all, I hv one and half month to 2 months at my disposal can I complete the project of building linux cluster? If the scripts mentioned there require a lot of tweaking to get them work,are there any online resources where I will get the corrected scripts and so on. For mosix and PVM, yes online resources are aplenty and good. But before that parallel processing comes into picture major hurdle is to get cluster working. My project more focuses on building cluster, testing the cluster with some pre-programmed application and performance analysis of the cluster.

I think, I am gonna have rigorous next 1-2 months but u'r help will certainly make my work easier.

regards,

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