Re: sgi

[Konstantinos P <konstantinos.pac@gmail.com>]

Blubaugh David A Civ AFRL/PRPG wrote:

> To Whom It May Concern,
>
> I was wondering if there is a way to combine old SGI machines, such as
> the O2 and indy workstations, along with old pentium class computers
> into a beowulf cluster supercomputer?  Any help will be appreciated!!!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> David Blubaugh 
>
I don't know if heterogeneous clusters is a common think, but yes you
can use different architectures to build a cluster.
The most common rules of homogeneous clusters can also be applied to
heterogeneous. For example, centralized logins, common file systems
(using a network file system i.e. nfs, or a parallel file system i.e.
pvfs/lustre), use of MPI libraries, etc...
You could also have two different front ends, one that manages the SGIs
and one that manages the PCs.
In case of MPI software you have to build your programs for all the
architectures you use and distribute it based on your configuration (i.e
use of common file systems).
One think that you should check carefully is the configuration of a
batch scheduler and how you can use one in a heterogeneous environment.
Finally, by using debian you can use FAI (Fully Automatic Installation)
for performing automatic installation in all compute nodes.

FAI - http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
PVFS - http://www.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs/
LUSTRE - http://lustre.org/

I hope this helps
Konstantinos