John,
I geeked with OpenMOSIX a couple years ago. I think all
you'd need to make it happen is to get your app to go thread crazy...
start lots and lots of threads. The version I was geekin' with was a
LiveCD that you booted to, which was the main unit. Then the clients
could PXE from the main unit, and auto-join the cluster
automatically. It was pretty sweet.
I proposed a scheme for a drug company that wanted to
increase their computational discovery power on the cheap.... get the
couple hundred office people boot to a customized OpenMOSIX CD when
they left for the night and the PhD's could do 2 to 3 months of
crunching each night. The problem was that the software license for
the number of nodes was in-freakin'-sane for the software that
actually did the discovery. No deal.
I have zero experience with the ClusterKnoppix project. It
seemed like OpenMOSIX did everything you are looking for, so I assume
that ClusterKnoppix is the trick. I think the RH cluster stuff is
just a fail-over or HA clustering solution based on Piranha... no HPC
stuff that I know of.
Mike
At 05:43 PM 2/27/2007, you wrote:
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.
I'd like to find something like ClusterKnoppix, except that's currently
supported, and that runs under Red Hat or CentOS 9which would be
preferable from a cost standpoint, even through Red Hat licensing for
HPC really isn't that bad... $79 per node IIRC) I'd like something that
already has all of the management and monitoring ready to go... master
node boots up, and then compute nodes PXE boot from it. Master node
sees all compute nodes, and already "knows" how to spread the work
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.
Commercial stuff is fine. I already talked to Red Hat, and after a lot
of dancing around, they admitted that they basically sell Red Hat
licenses, and not anything that actually does any kind of HPC. They
suggested that Platform Computing might be a solution... but it turns
out that they write and sell libraries, which you then need to write
software around.
We talked to Penguin at some point, too. They sell a whole package...
hardware and everything. And it ain't cheap :-) We can get hardware
for significantly less from our regular vendor, so an out-of-the-box
complete solution is an option if we can't find software, free or
commercial, that does what we want.
--
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* John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ *
* *
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