Re: cluster from intel and ppc?
Hi all!
On 5 Sep 2003, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 22:07, Grzesiek Sedek wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> Is it possible to create a mixed cluster consisting ppc and intel
> machines?
>
> Depends on what you're doing. I believe mpich does not do mixed
> architectures
For Linux that's almost true, they only offer LINUX (ia32, ia64, sparc
etc.) and LINUX_ALPHA as "different" architectures for ch_p4, see [0]
(known architectures). So far I only mixed a homogenous linux cluster with
solaris or hpux, which works fine.
There might be other ways for mpich and different devices (globus?).
> (http://bugs.debian.org/31779), but lam might;
I think lam does. But when I tried it, there were some problems with
datatypes on different architectures (in comparison with mpich). I don't
know whether that's still the case.
Either way you have to have a copy of your MPIch/LAM libraries available
on at least one node of each architecture (when using statically compiled
binaries).
Generally, when programming heterogenous clusters and using MPI, you have
to take care of the datatypes you use. MPI can do that for you (according
to the standard, www.mpi-forum.org), but you better make sure which sizes
the native datatypes have and what's the tradeoff.
> not at all sure about PVM and I would be *very* surprised if Mosix
> works.
Well, who cares about PVM ;) and in my opinion (Open)Mosix is a very nice
load balancer but not too useful for parallel programming, even if they
offer (single-)thread migration some day.
Kind regards,
Jens
[0] http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/docs/install/node79.htm
--
ruehmkorf at informatik dot uni hyphen koeln dot de
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