[wplug] Building a beowulf (was: ideas for the new year)

[Adam Cecchetti]

Why Not?

-----Original Message-----
From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org]On Behalf Of
James O'Kane
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2001 5:57 PM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: RE: [wplug] Building a beowulf (was: ideas for the new year)


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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