[Beowulf] Re: Why Do Clusters Suck?

[David Mathog]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 Douglas Eadline wrote:
> 
> So why do clusters suck?

Would that they did suck - it would make cooling them a lot
easier.  Unfortunately while most of them blow pretty well their
sucking sucks.

Which has nothing to do with your original post, assuming either of
these messages actually make it through anybody's spam filters.

More to the point, while there is certainly a lot
of room for improvement, an awful lot of work is
getting done today using existing cluster technology
and it's far from clear to me that an advance
in cluster management software would result in much more
productivity.  As opposed to, for instance, improving
network throughput, CPU power, or component reliability by
a factor of 10, any one of which would lead to an immediate
and dramatic productivity increase.

Regards, 

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech