Hi,
Just building a beowulf is in itself is a challenge - I'm impressed
that you're thinking about getting one together. As others have
said, Beowulfs are only useful if you have a tough problem to work on
(which also interests you).
My advice (as a physicist) is to find some problems that interest you
and then try to tackle them with your Beowulf. One way to do this is
to see if your local library has either "Duelling Idiots" (P Nahin,
ISBN 0691102864 ) or "The Computational Beauty of Nature" (G Flake,
ISBN 0262561271). Both are excellent introductions to computational
science.
I may get flamed for saying this - but computers will never take over
the world - its the people who program the computers who might.
Learn fortran90 (it'll take you 2 hours) and then get started in
science!
best of luck
Nathan Moore, PhD
Assistant Professor, Physics
Winona State University
AIM:nmoorewsu
skype:nathanmoore78
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On May 23, 2006, at 2:06 PM, Jess Cannata wrote:
Beowulf clusters (computational clusters) are much more useful if
you have a problem that needs a lot of processing power/time and
that can be broken apart either as a distributed or parallel job.
Molecular modeling, rendering, and protein/gene searching are some
good examples of this type of problem. There are other types of
clusters such as, high-availability web and database clusters that
serve different purposes than Beowulf clusters.
Of course, I think that there is educational value to building a
test cluster even if you have no computationally intensive jobs to
run on it. It can definitely help you to better understand Linux
and its associated packages. And who knows, it might even get you
interested in parallel programming.
Jess
sNAAPS eLYK wrote:
Hello, I'm Kyle Spaans, finishing my last year of highschool in
Northern Ontario, Canada, and I'm a budding Linux user. Also being
a computer geek I've got lots of computers lying around my house.
Since I'll soon have the summer ahead of me before heading off to
Post-Secondary [uWaterloo], I've got one quick question.
Hypothetically speaking, I manage to get a small number of
computers together in a working cluster, but now what can I do
with it? [EMAIL PROTECTED] is my main computing hobby, but I already
know what it won't take advantage in a cluster. I also don't do
any kind of rendering or any large scale content creation, nor is
writing computer programs a skill that I have.
So, as far as I can see, hosting game servers or a few other kinds
of servers [ventrilo, web, ftp, streaming media], and having a
sense of pride in accomplishment are the only things that I'll get
by building a beowulf cluster. Is this more or less true, or am I
missing something?
PS - if there is info about this that I obviously failed to find
in my searches, please tell me so!
Thanks for your time!
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