I thought some Mandrake users might be interested in this: Last Thursday (3/15/02) our local Linux user group (http://www.flux.org) had a speaker demonstrating how to setup a Beowulf. It was a small cluster consisting of only three machines, but apparently could scale without modification to 10 machines and with minor modifications to 16. With the addition of more control machines it could scale to 255 nodes or better.
All machines were running Mandrake 8.1 with all the latest patches (as of 3/15). The kernels were the stock versions from the ftp updates and no kernel rebuilds were necessary. Setup was simple, and boiled down to doing everything that the security HOWTO tells you not to do. I.e., you needed to allow passwordless root access to the nodes in the cluster and enable permissive network access. One machine with two NICs served as the master through which the cluster could be managed and secured. This was a heterogenous cluster; i.e., all the nodes had different hardware specs. This was cheaper, but there's apparently a performance and overhead penalty for not using identical machines. I was lucky enough to have my machines used for the cluster and after the presentation was over, I put them back on my network and added two other machines. Now there's a 5 node cluster happily chugging away in my bedroom :D. My wife has already made the appointment with the psychiatrist. The speaker, Dr. Raul Salazar of JHL Computing, told us that similar setups have been used to design chips and do similar rocket scientist stuff :).
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