Suggestion for gcc build farm

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 03:52:15PM -0400, Strange, John wrote:
> Hey Everyone,
> 
> Welp I'm about to embark on my first cluster adventure to build a gcc farm
> for our software developers, the goal of this project is to help distribute
> switch builds across pc platforms that we have about 50 of.  Now my question
> is that Beowulf seems to be a little much for something as simple or else
> I'm drawing the wrong conclusion.  I am taking suggestions on what would be
> the best way to go about building a gcc farm, would you use Beowulf or
> another open source application.  I'm looking for something open source or
> as close to free as I can get simply cause of budget restrictions.

If you mean distributed compilation (running many compilers concurrently as the
source tree dependencies permit, each on their own node), then
http://unthought.net/antsd  was created for exactly this purpose.  I use it on
a g++ compile farm.

Share /home via. NFS - and put multiple NICs in your NFS server (that's going
to be the bottleneck during linking).

We use our workstations as X-terminals (running X -query to the "login" server)
*and* as nodes in the compile farm.  This is a very well working (and
economical) solution for us.

Only pitfall:  You may want to avoid running C++ compilation with optimization
on the terminals   (our terminals have some 128MB of memory, the g++ can easily
grow to 300MB+)   -  this, however, is easily accomplished with ANTS.

ANTS is GPL (but I accept free beer ;)

-- 
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:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
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