Q: Any parallel DBs for the cluster computers ?

[Scott Shealy]

I think if you are looking  for polished open source stuff .... you are
probably out of luck.  But if you will accept a commercial solution look
into IBM's DB2 Extended Enterprise Edtion.  We have used this DB for large
warehousing and data mining projects extensively on our IBM SP(really
nothing more than a real fancy beowulf) and have been pleased with its
performance and awesome scalablilty.  Unlike Oracle OPS(really has
components of a shared architecture which doesnt scale as well), DB2 EEE
uses a shared nothing architecture that is difficult to
configure,administer, and adds an extra dimension for the DBA's and data
architects to deal with .... but really kicks! Recently IBM has released it
for linux and I think you can download a trial from them.  We are getting
ready to give it a whirl on our linux cluster.  You probably already know
this but you are  probably going to have to configure your beowulf nodes a
little differently than you typically do for other computational tasks.  You
will need to spend alot of money on the IO subsystem on each node(thats the
bottleneck in a DB) and if you are need to gurantee uptime you going to have
to think about fail over for each node.  Anyway have fun!

Scott Shealy

E811 Inc
sshealy at E811.com