[Beowulf] Small Distributed Clusters

[Tim Cutts]

On 4 Jul 2008, at 12:10 pm, Tony Travis wrote:

> I suggest you have a look at "dsh" (Dancer's distributed shell) as a  
> simple way to run programs across local and geographically separate  
> nodes in your cluster. This is very simple, but works remarkably  
> well, especially if you use SSH keys for password-less authentication.

dsh is very good, I agree, as is clusterssh.  They have overlapping,  
but distinct, purposes.  clusterssh gives you multiple xterms but with  
a single input window so you type into all xterms simultaneously  
(although you can still put the focus in an individual xterm, and just  
type commands to that one machine alone).  clusterssh is useful for  
those tasks which are more interactive.  dsh is better for rapid  
parallel running of non-interactive commands on very large numbers of  
machines... clusterssh gets a little unwieldy with more than 30 or so  
machines at a time, even if you set the xterm font to eye-wateringly  
small and have a monitor the size of a football pitch.

Both are available as packages in Ubuntu/Debian.

Tim


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