cluster frustrations

[Joachim Worringen]

Peter Lindgren wrote:
> A reference showing how many OTHER people can manage to install clusters:
> http://Beowulf-underground.org/success.html
> proving I must be the village idiot.
;-)

I'm quite confident that you're not the vi. I bet that 30% of those
"success stories" already ceased to exist as such, 50% are having
similar problems to yours and 20% are running "perfectly".

I.e., I use a cluster (9 Quad-Xeon nodes) which the computing centre
here in Jülich has built and is maintaining. It runs stable. with kernel
2.2, Myrinet and GM 1.1.3 - but with really unsatisfactory
(communication) performance. But they don't get it to run reliably with
the current Linux/GM/MPICH versions which of course should run faster,
better, nicer. I don't blame Linux or Myrinet for these problems - I
just want to show that even people capable of running Crays, SP-2s,
Paragon, any kind of workstatons etc. have a hard time setting up and
maintaining a Linux cluster. And the next update is usually the next
nightmare.

 Joachim

-- 
|  _  RWTH|  Joachim Worringen
|_|_`_    |  Lehrstuhl fuer Betriebssysteme, RWTH Aachen
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