[Beowulf] G5 beowulf cluster

[Isaac Dooley]

I've used the new ~600 node G5 Xserve cluster named turing: 
http://www.cse.uiuc.edu/turing/

It works, and is using OSX 10.3. I've used YellowDog Linux personally on 
a few G3 and G4 machines, and have had good experiences. If you want to 
do very fine grained parallel computation, one important thing to do is 
to disable all unneeded system daemons. There are a bunch of these in 
YDL and OSX. Also, depending on your needs for 64-bit addressing, you 
may need YDL until OSX 10.4 is released(it is available to developers 
now if you really want it). I'm not sure if you can disable the GUI for 
OSX, which may be a minor resource waster. Also you may want to consider 
Darwin without OSX. Darwin is the open source kernel used by OSX.

One thing we've noticed with our OSX is that connect() sometimes takes 
too long to complete. Hopefully I can figure out why this is.

Isaac Dooley

>Hello, we, at the physics institute in Mexico have got four Xserve G5
>and we would like to use them as a beowulf, my first doubt is about what
>operating system to use, we've been using linux for our other clusters,
>even a G4 one, but I haven't seen anything about G5, is there a linux
>distribution that runs well on this type of machines? or do I better use
>the operating system they came with? or are there any documentation out
>there outlining the way they should be configured to be used as a
>beowulf?
>  
>