On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 04:43:25PM -0800, Shawn P. Neugebauer wrote: > On Friday 10 January 2003 03:41 pm, Bill Broadley wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 02:48:38PM -0800, Ryan Detert wrote: > > > I am looking for a good howto or a really clear book on setting up a > > > beowulf cluster. I have 3 computers and I am wondering first off if it > > > would be easier to use NFS or having each node have a completely > > > functional OS. > > > > Hrm, thats a pretty large subject, what exactly are your goals? Resume > > fodder? A particular application? Parallelizing a particular code? > > I hear lots and lots of talk about building beowulf clusters, but I don't > hear much talk about applications. Is there existing software that > will distribute problems across such such clusters *automatically*?
Basically, in general, no. > I'm thinking about high-level software, e.g., Matlab, or octave, or even > a more special-purpose application. Or is the power of these clusters There are very specific things that can be auto-parallelized. But often the "parallel matlab" is just a small set of calls that runs in parallel. > only harnessed when I write near-custom, MPI-based code that > specifically parallelizes *my* problem? Correct, that is exactly how most of the research is done. There are commercial applications that are starting to support MPI for a particular area of research. The other case is in embarassingly parallel situations, say for instance a collider generates 100,000 collisions, each one takes 8 hours of number crunching, if you send one per cpu you can easily keep N<100,000 cpu's busy. > I recognize the difficulty in > auto-magically parallelizing, but what *good* is such a cluster if I > have to write custom code all the time? Well everyone wants a computer that magically answers all questions with no work, unfortunately the reality is for now that writing a parallel code that scales well on a beowulf cluster is pretty tough, the flip side is that the skill can be rather valuable. I've been programming for a few decades now, and parallel programming is definitely the most difficult thing I've tried. > I've got 3 computers, too, Ryan, and I've always wondered what I > could do to combine them into a more useful whole, especially for > Matlab-like processing. Well running 3 seperate jobs is easy (one per cpu), there is a parallel matlab product, but I believe it's not a generalized solution, just a few routines that can use MPI to utilize more than one cpu. I haven't looked recently there might even be a similar opensource project. -- Bill Broadley Mathematics UC Davis _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
