[Beowulf] how useful is bproc, and what does Scyld cost? (fwd)

[Kaveh Moallemi]

Hello,

I don't think that you should need to change distributions just to setup 
bproc, I found the installation of bproc quite simple.  We have a small 
educational cluster at school and we've been using bproc for several 
months now.  It lends it self really well for a diskless setup and as a 
bonus LAM/MPI can integrate with bproc so that MPI applications could also 
run on top of it.  I think that you would be pleased with Bproc.

BTW, it took us less than a day to convert our "traditional" cluster into  
a Bproc one.

Best of luck,

-- 

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 Kaveh Moallemi
 School of Computer Science
 Ryerson University
 Toronto, Canada


>From: Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct at debian.org>
>To: Camm Maguire <camm at enhanced.com>
>CC: Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>, beowulf at beowulf.org,Debian 
>Beowulf <debian-beowulf at lists.debian.org>
>Subject: Re: [Beowulf] how useful is bproc, and what does Scyld cost?
>Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 16:50:20 -0400
>
>There's also pretty complete community-maintained documentation at
>http://wiki.debian.net/ with the relevant material at
>http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebianBeowulf
>
>On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 15:41, Camm Maguire wrote:
> > Greetings!  No direct experience with diskless setups, but all the
> > cluster applications I need work out of the box on Debian.  There are
> > even precompiled atlas libraries for several common cpu
> > subarchitectures.  We've been running ours for about 7 years -- 1
> > software install, 3 hardware upgrades, and nothing but 'apt-get
> > upgrade' since.
> >
> > Take care,
> >
> > Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com> writes:
> >
> > > I'm tentatively planning a small cluster that might or might not
> > > actually get built.  My current plan is somewhere from 5-20 nodes, 1-2
> > > x86 CPUs per node (exact CPU flavor undecided), gigabit ethernet, and
> > > all nodes either entirely diskless, or using 1 IDE disk solely for
> > > swap and /tmp.
> > >
> > > I would prefer to have as much as posible of the cluster software
> > > infrastructure Just Work, rather than having to spend lots of time
> > > rolling my own.  (I will be spending enough time on the custom
> > > software I actually want to RUN on the cluster as is.)  I am, of
> > > course, quite willing to select hardware in order to make the software
> > > job easier on myself.
> > >
> > > Since I want to go diskless anyway, so far I am also leaning towards a
> > > bproc based cluster.  I only know of two bproc-based cluster
> > > distributions, Scyld and Clustermatic.  Scyld is commerical and costs
> > > money, Clustermatic is not and does not.  Are there any others?  In
> > > particular, are there any Debian based systems that play nicely out of
> > > the box with bproc?
> > >
> > > How much time and effort is Scyld actually going to save me over using
> > > Clustermatic?  How much is either going to save me over completely
> > > rolling my own, preferably using Debian rather than the old and
> > > outdated versions of Red Hat that Scyld and Clustermatic seem to use?
> > > Also, are there any major drawbacks or snafus I should worry about in
> > > going down the bproc route?
> > >
> > > Finally, just what DOES Scyld actually cost?  Can anyone give me a
> > > rough idea?
> > >
> > > >From Scyld's website, I can't tell whether they charge 50 cents or
> > > $5,000 per node, and the Scyld/Penguin salesman seemed unable to spit
> > > out any kind of ballpark price at all.  AFAICT, Scyld seems to expect
> > > you to first actually build your cluster, and then send them your
> > > cluster's complete hardware specs, down to the smallest detail, in
> > > order to get any kind of quote!
> > >
> > > Thanks!
>
>-Adam P.
>
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