Re: HPC with Beoqulf

[Carsten Aulbert <carsten.aulbert@aei.mpg.de>]

Hi

On Friday 14 January 2011 09:56:43 Patrick Schmid wrote:
> If I understood it correct, the Beowulf project is just a bundle of
> software to build a cluster.
> So I'm referring to some software which allows me to build a Linux HPC.

Yes and no :)

You first need to identify what you want/need:

* what is the (typical) problem you want to solve?
* what software do you need for that, do you need a batch scheduler or do you 
have very few users which work at the same place and share the cluster without 
technical measures?
* think about the OS (Debian is a good choice here ;))
* Think about the compute hardware, you probably need a login node, execute 
nodes and a file server, do you need many local cores or are the problems too 
large to fit into a few nodes? Then you need to look into networking 
(Infiniband or high performance Ethernet), is the software susceptible to 
latency and/or bandwidth available......

You see there are MANY questions to look at first, before you even want to 
start installing the machines :)

Try describing a "typical" problem, the sizes involved, that may help a lot.

Cheers

Carsten