Re: very basic cluster question

[Greg Lindahl <lindahl@conservativecomputer.com>]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 04:56:04PM -0800, Tracy Zhao wrote:

> 	I am trying to build a cluster and I've been trying to decide
> between building a Scyld Beowulf cluster and a Rocks cluster.

Tracy,

You don't say what you want to do on your cluster. This is a generic
cluster list, there is also a cluster list specific to Beowulf clusters.

The main difference between Scyld and Rocks is administration and
installation. Scyld is only a little more complicated than a single
system to install, even for a fairly large cluster. Rocks uses a
complete system disk on every node, and while it has a fairly
automated install sequence, it isn't as simple as Scyld.

The main question I'd have, though, is why you're "rolling your own"
cluster instead of buying from a cluster vendor. Since you work for a
business, I'd hope that one of the many Linux cluster vendors could
meet your needs and save you time.

> And how about having a database running on a cluster? 

It's easy to run a single database on a single node in a cluster, but
parallel databases are far more complicated. In the genomics world,
people usually run things like BLAST on their clusters, not their
databases.

greg

-
Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-cluster/