Am Mon, 2003-02-10 um 15.52 schrieb [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > With all of our layoffs, be have an abundance of spare Digital PW433au's. > I have convinced my boss to loan a pair to the local university, Indiana > Institute of Technology (IIT) where I teach. It will be a student led > project to get a single Master & Slave cluster going. If they can do this, > they get more. Probably a maximum of 10 nodes with primary and secondary > masters. > > Unfortunatley, I am extremely interested in this but have not had time to > participate or help with research. They basically need 2 things. > Suggestions/advice on configuration and management tools, and > suggestions/advice on what to do with it when it's finished. Right now, > they're thinking of letting it be used by SETI. > > The other issue - which distro. I gave them copies of RH7.2 when I gave > them the hardware. But the student who is leading it wants to use Debian. > Does anyone have experience to say which would be better interms of the > clustering software available? I've read great things about Scyld's > cluster software, but it looks like it's only x86 and I couldn't find the > source to download. Right now I'm reading the references on www.lcic.org. > > Thanks in advance. > ---- > Terry Bowling > Verizon NOTD Systems Support > 260.461.3772
OpenPBS and LAM-MPI are two things they should investigate. I'd suggest using Debian, too. At university I build a 10 Machine cluster with SuSE (I *had* to use it), which sucks... apt just rocks if you have several headless machines to keep up to date. A good parallel program which needs a lot of CPU power is tree-puzzle (www.tree-puzzle.de), a program to calculate evolutionary trees from nucelotide or protein sequences. You can actually run one computation on several nodes using lam-mpi or mpich, it also scales very good. The code is GPL'ed, so your students can study the parallisation code and maybe help improve it. Heiko Schmidt of Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics, the maintainer, is a nice guy to deal with. Maybe there is a Institute for Biology at your university which could get involved, too. Bioinformatics is the THE science with the biggest need for number crunching for the next few years, I think. hth, Jan Lentfer -- Jan Lentfer System Administrator Molecular Cell Biology / AG Holstein, Darmstadt University of Technology, Schnittspahnstr. 10, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany Tel: +49 6151 16 5563 / Tel private: +49 6155 899393 / mobile: +49 163 4712037
