I would guess you've already found these links, but if not:
http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsRb9fJ4Ds
A few things I would add:
At its core, I think FreeBSD is an ideal OS for clusters. It's faster
and more stable than any other OS I've worked with.
In my past life I managed about 30 Linux workstations using a wide
variety of hardware and several large servers for fMRI research. The
expected uptime of the Linux workstations varied from about a week to
infinity. We experienced frequent dropped connections on long-running
file transfers. The Linux NFS servers frequently froze up under
heavy load. I reproduced all these problems over several different
Linux distributions running kernels from 2.2 through early 2.6.
I decided to try FreeBSD on the servers, and they never crashed
again. In the several years I remained there, they only went down for
upgrades and power outages. I eventually rolled FreeBSD out to the
workstations, and most of them never crashed again (unless there was a
hardware problem, someone force-ejected a DVDRAM, etc.)
This is not to put Linux down, it's just pointing out that FreeBSD
worked better for us in an environment where maximum stability was
critical. We had researchers routinely running analysis jobs for
weeks or months, and moving datasets of 20 or 30 gigabytes to and from
the fileservers. FreeBSD's stability made all this run smoothly and
prevented a lot of setbacks in the research. Based on this
experience, I would have a lot of confidence in FreeBSD as a cluster
platform.
That said, Linux has its place as well. If I were going to fill a
school computer lab with general-use desktop machines for development,
Internet, etc., I would lean toward Ubuntu at this point for ease of
setup and maintenance. Having to reboot them once a month isn't going
to pose a problem in that environment.
The "obvious" advantage of Linux for clusters is availability of more
applications, although FreeBSD can run most Linux applications. I've
run Matlab versions 6.5, 7.3, and now 7.7 for Linux on FreeBSD. I've
seen reports of people running Mathematica and other apps. Matlab
7.7.0 works very well on FreeBSD 8.0, Java desktop and all. I have a
mostly functional port for it at http://personalpages.tds.net/
~jwbacon. There's also a port called "cluster-installer" under
development to help automate the setup of a FreeBSD cluster. You
should be able to use it to set up a small FreeBSD cluster in about
half a day. ( Note that there's a bug in the Ganglia port for which I
have submitted a PR. Check it out before attempting to set up
Ganglia. ) I've started working on ports for DL_POLY and Lava
(although the latter is low priority given that Sun Grid Engine and
Torque are already in the ports tree).
Good luck,
-J
On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:05 PM, Nilton Jose Rizzo wrote:
Hi all,
I`m work with FreeBSD some year, on servers ( http, smtp,smb
and other
thinks), now I`ll work with cluster to parallel computing. My
BigBoss should
be install Linux, but I would like to install FreeBSD, but I not
have idea
or correct point to start. I look for in google, and some
references talk
about Beowulf cluster. Is this only struct? Have differents about
perfomance
with work diskless struct and non-diskless? Is FreeBSD ready to
work with
parallel computing?
Please, send me links to white pappers or posts or one start
point.
TIA,
--
Nilton José Rizzo
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============================
Jason Bacon
Systems Programmer / Instructor
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
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