[wplug] Building a beowulf (was: ideas for the new year)
James O'Kane
jo2y at midnightlinux.com
Sun Dec 23 17:56:40 EST 2001
I'm a bit behind on my wplug mail, but the first question you need to ask
yourself before starting to build this is:
Why?
If you just want to be able to brag about having built one, then as long
as you acknowledge that before you start you'll do okay.
I started to build a cluster in my apartment once. My thought was I could
let people use it for free, but then I realized that most people who have
a use for one can get funding to build one better than what I was putting
together.
A slightly related project that would have much more practical
applications would be to build a webfarm. I've done this on a 3 machine
scale to see how it worked. There is software for the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel
that will do load balancing over several machines. With this software the
architecture of the server doesn't matter. We could take all of these IPX
machines and see what kind of performance we can get out of them compared
to a single PIII/Athlon.
-james
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