Re: Getting Started
I have put together a µCluster that addresses some of these concerns.
Photogs of
it can be seen here...
http://www.extreme-linux.com/pix
As you can probably see from the pix, I have a lid that opens up so that you
can maintain the nodes. I reversed the power connections on one side to bury
the cables in the belly of the box; I have palm switches that go in there as
well. It is arranged so that the MoBos function much like blades; I have
(since
the pix were taken) put an ATX umbilical together so that when you pull the
MoBo out it springs loose. Putting it back in is a little trickier. I eschewed
latency concerns in favor of bandwidth ones and implemented a channel-bonding
scheme much like the one used at http://ilab.usc.edu/beo. Marty Connor wrote a
wonderful PXE HOWTO at www.ltsp.org/documentation/pxe.howto.html that pretty
much worked right out of the box for me... I need to make some more design
changes before it is ready for primetime and then I am going to loan it to Jon
Proulx (of this list and elsewhere) to evaluate for a while.... I agree with
many of Jorge's suggestions (I ran his page through the URL translator at
worldlingo.com) and for raw heat-spewing, number-crunching, beowulf-thrashing
performance, AMD CPUs are the way to go...
...now if only we could get the data to and from the AMD MoBos faster!
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Kurt Keville
Debian Beowulf Users Group (DeBUG)
http://www.extreme-linux.com
Cluster On!
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