> On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, David Kewley wrote: > > By the way, the idea of rolling-your-own hardware on a large cluster, > > and planning on having a small technical team, makes me shiver in > > horror. If you go that route, you better have *lots* of experience > > in clusters. and make very good decisions about cluster components > > and management methods. If you don't, your users will suffer > > mightily, which means you will suffer mightily too.
On Friday 28 April 2006 16:36, Robert G. Brown wrote: > I >>have<< lots of experience in clusters and have tried rolling my own > nodes for a variety of small and medium sized clusters. Let me clarify. > For clusters with more than perhaps 16 nodes, or EVEN 32 if you're > feeling masochistic and inclined to heartache: > > Don't. > > Or you will have a really high probability of being very, very sorry. On Sunday 30 April 2006 09:42, Mark Hahn wrote: > I believe that overstates the case significantly. > > some clusters are just plain easy. it's entirely possible to buy a > significant number of conservative compute nodes, toss them onto a > generic switch or two, and run the whole thing for a couple years without > any real effort. I did it, and while I have a lot of experience, I > didn't apply any deep voodoo for the cluster I'm thinking of. it started > out with a good solid login/file/boot server (4U, 6x scsi, dual-xeon 2.4, > 1G ram), a single 48pt 100bt (1G up) switch, and 48 dual-xeon nodes > (diskful but not disk-booting). it was a delight to install, maintain > and manage. I originally built it with APC controllable PDUs, but in the > process of moving it, stripped them out as I didn't need them. (I _do_ > always require net-IPMI on anything newly purchased.) I've added more > nodes to the cluster since then - dual-opteron nodes and a couple GE > switches. > > > For clusters with more than perhaps 16 nodes, or EVEN 32 if you're > > feeling masochistic and inclined to heartache: > > with all respect to rgb, I don't think size is a primary factor in > cluster building/maintaining/etc effort. certainly it does eventually > become a concern, but that's primarily a statistical result of > MTBF/nnodes. it's quite possible to choose hardware to maximize MTBF and > configuration risk. Ah, so my opinion is midway between Mark's & RGB's. A very nice place to sit. :) David _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
