Clarifying the differences would hep a bunch. I have talked with
several 'cluster' admins that had no clue about high performance
clustering.
If you call Cisco and tell them you are running a cluster they will
try to sell you a switch with high inbound/outbound traffic but piss
poor inter-port communication speeds. They try to make there switches
run really fast for things like HA clusters but fall short on
performance clusters (where everything talks to everything). Also,
techniques like Flat Neighborhood Networks are pointless on a HA
cluster but can be a god send on HPC clusters. These subtle
differences are actually much larger than people realize.
If you are planning on writing a MPI programming guide you are
looking at a bunch of writing. Parallel programming regardless of the
API used is tricky. Communication methods, shared resource processing
and the like make parallel programming more of an art form than just
another API to use.
One last question for you all.. Why is distcc so popular? We used it
on our 134 node cluster and it actually made compiling much slower
than just running it on one of the nodes. The network overhead killed
the performance gain. The only way we found that it helped was
writing the makefile itself to take advantage of parallelism. Is this
uncommon for most people?
On Apr 11, 2006, at 7:47 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hanni Ali wrote:
[ Snip ]
Maybe a split in HA-Clustering, HPC-clustering and large-scale
sysadmin
with gentoo.
The large-scale sysadmin is overlapping for both, HA can be
usefull in
smaller setups, HPC is seldomly used in small setup AFAIK
[ Snip ]
I agree; different topics different sections.
I'd like to see something like:
Gentoo Cluster Handbook
I. Sys Admin Requirements - What reader must know before moving
forward
(maybe describe clustering types here?)
II. SysAdmin for Clusters - tools/support servers/etc
III. HA Clustering - web/email failover/etc
IV. HPC Clustering - batch processing/etc
V. Intro to MPI - Merge the other MPI howto and add some?
And of course each volume is full of useful information
/djb
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