[Beowulf] Building a Beowulf - Noob

[Jon Forrest]

On 4/17/2010 9:15 PM, Richard Chang wrote:
> I am a bit new. Trying to build a cluster from ground up. I need to
> build a new 32 node cluster from ground up.
>
> Hardware has been decided, Nehalam based, but OS is still a debate. I am
> in a dilemma whether to keep things simple or to cut costs.
>
> In order to keep things simple, I can order Platform Cluster Manager
> with RHEL HPC license per node. Or I can use Rocks with CentOS.
>
> I want to know what the other members of this list do.

What I do is use the free Rocks clustering package
(http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/). It's free
and you can be up and running in no time.

Also free is Perceus (http://www.perceus.org/portal/)
which takes a different approach than Rocks.
It's more work to get started but what you end
up with is exactly what you want - no more and no less.

There's no reason to spend any money on software to
create a cluster. Maybe later you'll find some commercial
products that solve specific problems, but one of the nice
things about modern clusters is that there's so much
good quality free software available.

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu