[Bioclusters] cluster hardware question

[Andrew Shewmaker`]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003 08:13:34 -0600 (CST)
"Duzlevski, Ognen" <ogd@stowers-institute.org> wrote:

> > > Also very much overlooked is the issue of cluster management.  This
> > tends to guide the choice of Linux distribution.  Management gets to be
> > painful after the 8th compute node, the old models don't work well on
> > multiple system image machines.
> 
> What are the usual choices here? Any recommendations, web-sites, companies
> I should be looking at in particular? 40 nodes would be our starting point
> but we could easily move up to more in time. Many vendors offer various
> alternatives - I think personally I would like to have something that is
> easy to understand and is not a complete black box.

I've tried many of the cluster environments for Linux including Rocks, OSCAR, 
and Scyld.  The first two are pretty similar in a lot of ways...I would say 
Rocks is a little easier and OSCAR is more flexible.  Scyld is commercial, and  
I would say it is the absolute easiest, but will also cost you.

http://www.rocksclusters.org
http://oscar.sf.net
http://www.scyld.com

> Joe, I know this could easily turn into a thick book :), but how does one
> get more educated about these things?

Check out http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/beowulf_online_book/
and read the beowulf mailing list archives.  
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/423/0/
Robert G. Brown's emails are very good sources of information.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Shewmaker
Associate Engineer
Phone:  208.526.1415
Fax:  208.526.4017

Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
2525 Fremont Ave.
Idaho Falls, ID 83415-3605