[Beowulf] backbone of a large-file streaming system

[Mark Hahn]

> Expert, where I am building a knowledgebase of cluster and grid information.

this list is mainly for HPC-type clusters.  the cluster question
below is more of a server-farm type cluster.  grids are also mostly
disjoint with this list, since grids are inherently very loosely coupled.

> *"I am looking for a variety of solutions to be a backbone of a large-file
> streaming system providing thousands of concurrent download streams.

without numbers, it's impossible to say.  what's the total bandwidth?
supporting thousands of active tcp sockets is no longer much of a trick
on a single (hefty) machine, which means that you'll probably saturate 
your network before you absolutely have to go to multiple servers.