Greetings! No direct experience with diskless setups, but all the cluster applications I need work out of the box on Debian. There are even precompiled atlas libraries for several common cpu subarchitectures. We've been running ours for about 7 years -- 1 software install, 3 hardware upgrades, and nothing but 'apt-get upgrade' since.
Take care, Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm tentatively planning a small cluster that might or might not > actually get built. My current plan is somewhere from 5-20 nodes, 1-2 > x86 CPUs per node (exact CPU flavor undecided), gigabit ethernet, and > all nodes either entirely diskless, or using 1 IDE disk solely for > swap and /tmp. > > I would prefer to have as much as posible of the cluster software > infrastructure Just Work, rather than having to spend lots of time > rolling my own. (I will be spending enough time on the custom > software I actually want to RUN on the cluster as is.) I am, of > course, quite willing to select hardware in order to make the software > job easier on myself. > > Since I want to go diskless anyway, so far I am also leaning towards a > bproc based cluster. I only know of two bproc-based cluster > distributions, Scyld and Clustermatic. Scyld is commerical and costs > money, Clustermatic is not and does not. Are there any others? In > particular, are there any Debian based systems that play nicely out of > the box with bproc? > > How much time and effort is Scyld actually going to save me over using > Clustermatic? How much is either going to save me over completely > rolling my own, preferably using Debian rather than the old and > outdated versions of Red Hat that Scyld and Clustermatic seem to use? > Also, are there any major drawbacks or snafus I should worry about in > going down the bproc route? > > Finally, just what DOES Scyld actually cost? Can anyone give me a > rough idea? > > >From Scyld's website, I can't tell whether they charge 50 cents or > $5,000 per node, and the Scyld/Penguin salesman seemed unable to spit > out any kind of ballpark price at all. AFAICT, Scyld seems to expect > you to first actually build your cluster, and then send them your > cluster's complete hardware specs, down to the smallest detail, in > order to get any kind of quote! > > Thanks! > > -- > Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://www.piskorski.com/ > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > -- Camm Maguire [EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================================== "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
