disadvantages of linux cluster

[M A Suzen]

Hi,

Disadvantage of such a distributed environment would be administrative and 
maintaince cost as you said, apart from communication interconnect. 
(assuming that we are comparing PC-cluster with SGI-multiproc machine)

It is extremely stable (Linux based distributed environments).
Absolutely, it is designed to be work in high load. (mentioning multi-user
is rather trivial due to fact that very good solutions on load-balancing) 
How experimental a cluster is depends on owner and his/her implementation?
One should optimize needs versus availability. Pros and cons of
interconnect selection. One should consider power of GNU/Linux
carefully.

Mehmet

--On 05 November 2002 9:30am +0100 Stephane Glockner <glockner at enscpb.fr> 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I work in a french university laboratory. We do massive Computational
> Fluid Dynamics at present time on ORIGIN2000, IBM Regatta... The solution
> of  a Beowulf cluster seems very interesting as regards as financial cost
> and  performances.
> We would like to use it in the following manner :
> - multi users (around 10 or 15 users)
> - multi single-processor, light and heavy applications (<=2Go of RAM)
> - use of a parallel version of our application
>
> I didn't see anywhere on the web disadvantages of such a solution. What
> are  they ? Is it simple to administrate day after day ? Is it stable ?
> Does it  support heavy load of users and applications as defined above ?
> Isn't it too  much an experimental solution ?
>
> Thanks for your responses
>
> S. Glockner
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>