begin quoting John Oliver as of Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 05:43:57PM -0800: > I'm looking into the software to build a compute cluster. > > I found ClusterKnoppix, which looks really cool, except it hasn't been > touched in over 2 years. Searching around has led me to OpenMOSIX, > ParallelKnoppix, and all sorts of other items. [chop] > around. The applications we want to run are not cluster-aware, and we > have no idea how long it would take for the developers to rewrite them, > and then go through with debugging them... I'm hoping to find something > that basically presents one machine with a lot of CPUs to the > application, and that handles the workload itself.
....so how would you expect your application to be parallelizable? Throwing a cluster at an arbitrary program has a very small chance of doing any good, even if you go with something like MOSIX. I suppose if it's heavy into spawning off independent processes that do some computation and write some output to disk at the end you'd have some luck, I suppose. But if you have monolitic programs, or even pthread heavy programs, you might not see any speedup at all -- aside from the power meter. You'll probably want to start small, regardless, and keep a close eye on how much of a speedup you're getting; the overhead can quickly swamp your performance gains if you aren't careful. -- That being said, I've heard good things about NPACI ROCKS. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
