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

[Edward Walter]

Knowing how to setup and manage a High Availability/Failover cluster seems
like it would be more useful than a parallel processing one.  The web farm,
with load balancing, is something that any one of us could encounter in an
everyday IT environment.  I'd also be interested to see redundant clustering
/ load balancing of other services such as NFS or SMB.  Obviously, the Holy
Grail would be redundant database server$$$. ;^)
-Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org]On Behalf Of
David Gerard Matthews Jr.
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2001 10:23 PM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: Re: [wplug] Building a beowulf (was: ideas for the new year)


The webfarm idea sounds cool to me.  I don't think the idea was ever
Beowulf-specific; it was more like "let's build a cluster", and Beowulf
was the first thing that came to mind.  I think the plan was to do it
for bragging rights, though, because I'm pretty sure we would have to
tear it down at the end of the day.
-dgm


James O'Kane wrote:
>
> 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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