Commercial purposes, and NOT technical purposes. If apple produces
supercomputers and got included at the top 500, I bet they wouldnt
use
linux, they will use their flagship MacOSX.
actually Apple does have a cluster on the top 500. Virginia Tech (an
engineering school in the US) has a cluster of Apple PowerPC XServes.
they're number about 47 now... but when they started around 2004...
they were in the top 20. The Apple Cluster uses OS X.
the hidden secret is this: the mac platform is VERY easy to cluster.
all you need is the XGrid Agent. the machines you could buy at your
friendly local apple store... they're all already configured for
clustering. all you need is the xgrid agent (free download)... and a
network... and your wifi network will just do fine or you could buy a
gigabit switch... etc. Apple does sell enterprise-grade clustering
solutions based on Mac OSX.
a lot of people do use clusters for Commercial purposes... mostly in
Digital Content Creation... i.e. special effects.
a lot of people use clusters to do simulations i.e. effects of
nuclear detonations, climate prediction, in bioinformatics... etc. etc.
the top 500 is a prestigious list... like having polling who has the
baddest super-car in the world. a who's who of computing, the fastest
kick-ass... and admit it... it would be nice to see your name on that
list wouldn't it?
building a cluster--- is an art and a science. you can build one in
your home right now, using p3s, 386es etc. but then latency...
speed... cost v. performance issues will come out... would you really
want to? the reason why Linux is so popular with the clustering
community is that it is very configurable. cluster builders can
tailor their particular linux distro to fit their respective
application. Cluster builders have a goal of what they want computed
and their boxes are tailored to run that. Linux is very much the
ideal platform.
there are many considerations in building a cluster. it is why you
have low-latency network connections--- because those are important.
imagine computing it on fast boxes but having a bottleneck in
"combining" the results or sending the next result to the cluster
node. we can't have that. or having fast interconnection but lousy
scheduling on your boxes... we can't have that either.
is it possible to build a cluster using say, Windows? yes. Is it
possible to build a cluster using OSX? yes. in NetBSD? yes. in
OpenBSD? of course. hell i've been experimenting on building a
"Virtual" cluster using Parallels for the Mac running a virtual
gentoo linux... Some scientists have built virtual clusters using
Xen. speed. performance. latency. operating system. the problem at
hand and expertise of the user... all play important roles in
building a cluster. you know what i've found out? its all about what
you want to do: right tools for the right job.
cheers.
cocoy
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