Debian Beowulf
Greetings! I work for a company which has decided to attempt
to replace its SGI Power Challenge with a Beowulf type Linux system.
The primary reason behind this decision is the expense of SGI support
and maintenance of non-commodity hardware. We have an eventual budget
of 10 to 20 thousand dollars, with about 8 to 9 to work with at
first. We have several years experience (all positive) with Linux;
the most recent being with Debian Linux. We plan on using Debian for
this project, and, if successful, would hope that we could use the
project to advertise the strengths of Debian.
I would greatly appreciate any advice from the readers of this list on
what hardware would be best for this project. Is the Alpha
distribution ready for prime-time? What about SMP boards? We'd like
to get the most bang for our buck, but don't have the manpower to
handle extensive software debugging/instability. Also, if any
knowledgeable reader could comment on any performance surprises which
may be in store for us, that would be most helpful. The Beowulf
systems I've seen described so far claim to peak at around 1.2 GFLOPS
for 16 machines, which is about 2 to 3 times faster than to 400 MFLOPS
we get with the Power Challenge, but I'm sure this is task dependent
and I'd like to get a feel for how this performance will degrade as
the granularity of the parallelism decreases.
Thanks!
--
Camm Maguire camm@enhanced.com
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