Uses for a beowulf cluster?

[Daniel J. Frasnelli]

Hi Tracy,

On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Tracy R Reed wrote:
> Why not use a round-robin DNS to spread the load and just share the
> users home directories among all of the machines?
	Sat down and talked with an associate about the issue, and between
us we decided that I might have too narrow a definition of what
parallelism is and isn't.  My definition (I can probably find some books
to back this up, but it would be meaningless) of a parallel cluster is a
network of workstations meeting specific criteria such as having: 
1) Node-to-node communication and data passing, 2) Shared memory, and 
3) Input/output concurrency.   
	By this narrow criteria, my suggested load balancing act via a
smart NAT box is not parallelism.  In a broader sense, it is distributed
computing.  Folks (myself included) need to realize that parallel
computing is not limited to the implementations at GSFC, LANL, or any
other institution.  We're working in a relatively new field
(parallel computing for the masses), and much of the terminology is not
set in granite.  
	He went on to say that multicasting node activity/status would
diminish the effectiveness of the network, and suggested a round-robin DNS
configuration.  

Best regards,
Daniel   

---
Daniel J. Frasnelli		Remote sensing scientist
dfrasnel @ wvu.edu		Imaging spectroscopy researcher
Explore terrestrial physics! http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/