BSD Clustering?

reidhoch asks: "My school would like to create a small cluster, we want to use BSD but can't think of any BSD clustering projects. We don't have the time and/or resources to start such a project either. If you know of any such ongoing projects, please enlighten me."

beowulf - think power requirements

[bluGill]

While in theory you can gather up enough junk 486s to make the top 500 list (assuming a lossly coupled problem), in practice the electrical cost would probably be greater then the cost of buying better machines. I suppose if everything worked on the first try, and you only had the system togather for a few minutes it wouldn't be that bad, but in the real world it won't work that well.

Back when RC-56 looked like a 50 year problem at current rates someone suggested room fulls of 386s (a 486 was still useful if a bit slow). I calculated that you would be better off buyiung a ppro-200 (the fastest machine money could have at that time though ppc soon after got optimsed) and your savings on electrisity would pay for the innitial cost in less then a year. (This assuming you could get 386s for free, and you had to pay for the ppro, and you wanted the same key rate). The work of settup up that many computers was not factored in.

Same as linux.

[Karpe]

I don see why can't you use PVM or MPI or other message passing systems on FreeBSD to run a cluster with BSDs.

You just have to set the machines to allow rsh (os better, ssh) connections, ./configure && make && make install lam, for instance, and lamboot your cluster.

(I'm just suggesting lam because it is what I've been playing with, but you can use any other system).

There is nothing special about linux. A good parallel system should be independent of plataform, right?

Load balancing?

[Rob Kaper]

You didn't mention the purpose of clustering, but if you want to use load balancing check out Zeus [zeus.com].

Works on various Unices. It might be pricy for a school (no price available but I expect it will cost you) but you might at least want to try the free evaluation copy.

We love BSD

[mop2099]

Cuz BSD just rocks the house, that's why they don't wanna use Linux.

Why BSD?

[affegott]

Why BSD? Why not just put together a nice Linux Beowulf cluster... especially with software from http://www.pileofpcs.org comming down the pipe?

Just out of curiosity, about how many GFlops does it take to get on the Top 500 super computer list? It has always been my goal in life... time to build the worlds fastest computer out of 486's. :-)

Hmmm... that would be interesting. I wonder what the practical limmit for the speed of a clustor of 486's is... say if you used 100Mbit enet... anyone know? It must begin to cap out somewhere...

Notorious R.P.Z.

Re:Why BSD?

[affegott]

What would you say the is bare minimum hardware to get on the list? Some 350 K6-2's? P2? :-) Just a pipe dream of mine... I have to do something with all this money I am losing in the stock market. :-(

Ryan

BSD Cluster Info

[elbuddha]

These links were ripped straight from http://www.freebsd.org/~nik/advocacy/myths.html#cl ustering , and I haven't checked any of them out for myself for usefulness to your need. But here goes:

http://www.sarnoff.com:8000/docs/metacomputing.h tml
http://cubix.desy.de/General/bsd/bsd.html
http://www.genebee.msu.su/Descript.html
http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/workshops/Talks/Mikle r/mikler.html
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~pleiter/edv/unix .html
http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~milind/MediaServers.h tml
http://www.rwcp.or.jp/lab/pdslab/dist/
http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/ClusterCookb ook/index.html