It was on Sun, 23 Jan 2000, Shanker R Swaminathan typed in this..
>*>Have a look at the Beowolf def. - One does not go about creating MIMD
>*>systems for fun unless you can show that the results justify it.
Hi Shanker,
You seem to have missed my point. Beowulfs are clusters fine -
tuned for SPEED. SPeED is the word, nothing else. Nothing else.. we are
not looking at accomodating heterogeneity in the avavilable machines to
build up a Beowulf cluster. If SPEED is not optimised we can call it a
"cluster", or a NOW or a POP.. but not a Beowulf. Then again, who cares
about definitions. ?
I do not get your idea of running a VM on multiple machines to
build a cluster.
(A) Implementations of MPICH/PVM on Windows are flakey or broken.
Do not even try to use them ;)
(B) Running a VM on multiple machines _will_ slow down your
performance.
(C) Running 450 MHz chips with a 10Mbps backplane is NOT
Beowulfing... throwing to the winds all the fundae
surface to volume ratios of orthogonal tile graphs.
An interesting question is "What is the universal metric of
performance ?"
As far as __testing__ MIMD / SPMD applications on NOW, VM should
suffice , provided you hand code explicit socket based libraries for
message passing or MAPI stuff, but I reassert that is not going to be a
Beowulf, as far as the speed factor is concerned.
One more thing, Transputers don't give you performance factors
anywhere near to a properly tuned NOW. So there is no point in sticking
with them. Also,if you have debugged in OCCAM, you will realize why
this immeasurable hate ;)
Regards
Shourya
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_______________________________________________________________
Shourya Sarcar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <Tel:91-033-4710477>
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Jadavpur University Calcutta, India 700 032
All the world's a stage..
And I am acting tonight
C - the difference : http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
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