Uses for a beowulf cluster?

[Geoff Lane]

> My question is: Will a beowulf do the job or is it not up to the job? Has
> anyone done such a thing?

Up to the job - certainly - but maybe not straight out of the box.

Fujitsu do a pile-of-sparc-workstations system (the AP3000) with 200Mbyte
bidirectional internal network.  They wrote custom s/w to monitor the
workload on each node + a couple of programs, pmlogin which initially
selects the node with the most resources free for the user to initially
login to and pmswitch to allow the user to flip to another node should their
node become too busy.

pmlogin and pmswitch aren't rocket science (there are people working on true
process migration I believe) but should be reasonably simple to implement
for a beowulf providing interactive services.


-- 
Geoff. Lane.					Manchester Computing