From: james.mcboyle at domain ireland.sun.com
Date: Tue 14 Aug 2001 - 13:05:38 IST
> Hi all,
>
> Well well, all this movie speak is making me wan't to build a supercomputer
> - albeit with two nodes :). Beowulf come to mind, and it looks mad
> complicated to boot. From my understanding, its not that much different to
> SMP systems. You have an NFS share, and high speed access between the two +
> nodes. Ideally servernet but apparantly 100Mbit switched is fine. NASA have
> a few pictures online, one has 200Mhz pentium MMX's - approx 500 of them all
> connected over switched network. And one terminal to administer the cluster.
For a small two-node cluster you can get away with a 10Mbit link.
Building a Beowulf is a lot less of a pain than it at first seems... honest :-)
Just make sure you have fairly identical installations on both boxes, shove
on the beowulf extras, normally included in most distros nowadays, and add mpi
or... the other one :-) (well, it _has_ been over a year since I built mine<g>)
> Anyone ever built one? Just how hard was it to do? I had a look at the
> how-to, and methinks a howto understand the beowulf how-to is needed...
> (mind you it was a year ago that I looked)
Simple, piece of cake (and I got away with building one for my final year
project... nice!)
> I suppose one would have to run an SMP enabled application - quake3 come to
> mind :)
SMP aware isn't the problem, _cluster_ aware is more the thing you have to
check for (though this is a year out of date, they might be able to handle
SMP-enabled apps without too many problems now, dunno)
Try getting a simple rendering program to work first (tis one of the easier
tasks to do, IMHO) and then play to see what you can get away with :-)
> Any "understandable" guides out there?
Check www.beowulf-underground.org for everything Beowulf... one of the best
(again IMHO) sites going for clustering stuff. Other sites I found helpfull
include:
http://www.beowulf.org
http://cedis1.gsfc.nasa.gov/beowulf/howto/
http://dune.mcs.kent.edu/~farrell/equip/beowulf/
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/beowulf/tutorial/tutorial.html
not sure if the links all work, as I just copied them from my old bookmark
file...
Have fun, and don't pull out too much hair! :-)
Jim.
-- James McBoyle /"\ James.McBoyle at domain ireland.sun.com \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign Software Engineer X Against HTML Mail QED SunConfigs / \
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