Hi Jay, Originally we were looking into Scyld, but I believe the Scyld license costs around $375 / processsor. Scyld has a reputation of being a somewhat easier to manage cluster solution. When I was first looking into clusters Scyld was cheaper than it is now, and even had an educational discount. Their prices went up a few months ago and thus Scyld was no longer an option. I would rather pay money for hardware than software, but perhaps the expensive licensing will change now that Penguin has bought them out (but I doubt it). So then I started looking at Rocks and Oscar, and both are free. Oscar seems to be a very popular choice now, but from my limited experience looks to be somewhat more difficult to manage than Rocks. From what I can tell, Rocks is the easiest to setup, but it's one of the young cluster OS'es. Oscar and Rocks are both based on RedHat 7.3 and contact much of the same job schedulers, etc. I'm waiting on my head node to arrive from Penguin, but hopefully it'll be arriving soon so that I can set it up and get it going. I'm very new to this but I hope I'll be able to get everything running well with Rocks. You can read about them at http://www.scyld.com , http://oscar.sourceforge.net , and http://www.rocksclusters.org - and of course Penguin Computing's website is http://www.penguincomputing.com.
The entire cluster is going to be in one 42U rack. Each compute node is only 1U, so we could add more into our current setup if needed. I'm using gig-E interconnects between nodes. FWIW, I contacted Dell, IBM, and Penguin for quotes. Penguin was by far the most affordable. They don't have all the extras, like a separate switch for CMOS access to all nodes, etc, but I'm okay with that. Penguin is a small company that only sells computers with Linux. Their response has been great - I could tell they really wanted my business even though the cluster I ordered from them is modest in size at best. Joe On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Jay Barrett wrote: > Hi Joe, > > Do you mind me asking what software you are using to manage your cluster and > if it is all going to be in one location. I have started doing some > research into grids and clusters and would be interested in hearing how you > make out. > > At one time there was a small amount of interest in clusters at Trilug > didn't know if anyone still has any interest or not. > > Regards, > Jay > > TGIF > > -- > TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug > TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ > TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ > TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
