On Thu, Sep 16, 1999 at 07:30:18PM +0200, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> How is the Debian GNU/Linux Beowulf system going? Have any README's
> been written, any FAQ created?
Not visibly, although a lot of your questions would probably be answered
by the more generic HOWTOs and things. (Is someone working on the
website?)
> What do one need (package wise, kernel patches)? It's been about 7
> months since I last checked this, and then it wasn't very mature,
> and I didn't have time to play around...
All you really need to dip your toe in the water is some networked
computers. Write some software which distributes some work over them
and there we are (or use some of the examples...). There are several
packages which provide libraries for managing the communicaton - PVM,
LAM and MPICH are the ones I can think of off-hand. Someone who does
this more seriously can probably provide further suggestions.
The main thing that's missing (other than documentation) is probably a
remote/cluster admin tool.
> What about hardware? Does it have to be the same hardware, or is it
> possible to mix power (i386, PentiumIII, Alpha and PowerPC etc)?
It's possible to mix powers and arches, although when you do that you
have to work out how to distribute the work between the nodes. Due to
upstream bugs you use MPICH can't mix CPU archs with Linux (see bug
#31779), but the other libraries and your home-grown code should support
this.
> Speed/Length of the network (one machine at home, the other at work)?
Fast enough to push the data you want through. :-)
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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