Re: HPC with Beoqulf

Hi Carsten

It has to be a HPC cause it's a given challenge: "Build a Linux HPC
with ethernet"

2011/1/14 Carsten Aulbert <[email protected]>:
> * what is the (typical) problem you want to solve?

The goal is to split up the load of computing a job to multiple nodes.

> * what software do you need for that, do you need a batch scheduler or do you
> have very few users which work at the same place and share the cluster without
> technical measures?

second one.

> * think about the OS (Debian is a good choice here ;))

OS isn't chosen yet.
But i can handle nearly every Linux distribution, so I'm free in that
point. Depends on which distribution the needed software is running.

> * Think about the compute hardware, you probably need a login node, execute
> nodes and a file server, do you need many local cores or are the problems too
> large to fit into a few nodes? Then you need to look into networking
> (Infiniband or high performance Ethernet), is the software susceptible to
> latency and/or bandwidth available......

there are 7 sun fire x4000 with ethernet (infiniband would get to expensiv).
I don't need much storage, but I could use NAS if needed.

> You see there are MANY questions to look at first, before you even want to
> start installing the machines :)

I see ;)

> Try describing a "typical" problem, the sizes involved, that may help a lot.

So you have a script / job you need to compute, and need a fast way to
to that. That's typically it ;)
My imagination is, that you upload this script to a master node, which
splits it up and distributes the parts to its nodes.

hope you can understand :)

What do you think? Still possible to do that with Beowulf?

Cheers
Patrick