On Friday 10 January 2003 03:41 pm, Bill Broadley wrote: > On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 02:48:38PM -0800, Ryan Detert wrote: > > I am looking for a good howto or a really clear book on setting up a > > beowulf cluster. I have 3 computers and I am wondering first off if it > > would be easier to use NFS or having each node have a completely > > functional OS. > > Hrm, thats a pretty large subject, what exactly are your goals? Resume > fodder? A particular application? Parallelizing a particular code?
I hear lots and lots of talk about building beowulf clusters, but I don't hear much talk about applications. Is there existing software that will distribute problems across such such clusters *automatically*? I'm thinking about high-level software, e.g., Matlab, or octave, or even a more special-purpose application. Or is the power of these clusters only harnessed when I write near-custom, MPI-based code that specifically parallelizes *my* problem? I recognize the difficulty in auto-magically parallelizing, but what *good* is such a cluster if I have to write custom code all the time? I've got 3 computers, too, Ryan, and I've always wondered what I could do to combine them into a more useful whole, especially for Matlab-like processing. shawn. > > I'd check out: > http://www.beowulf.org > > I'd also recommend joining the beowulf mailing list (same site). > > I happen to be teaching a Beowulf Design and Parallel Programming > course for the second time at the moment. > > In general, in the loosest terms a beowulf is basically a collection > of commodity hardware (i.e. pc's or similar), running an open OS, and > running some software layer for communication (I.e. MPI). So if you > have 3 linux boxes just install MPICH: > http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/ _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech