Lombard, David N wrote:
> Depends on what you mean by "a career in computational clusters." Users > and many of the best parallel programmers come from science (not CS) and > engineering. Precious little formal instruction exists for parallel > programming at all, let alone MPI, OpenMP, et al. so most have learned > parallel programming by necessity. I come from a CS background, and I have a 'career in computational clusters'. It started as a graduate student in CS where I worked on a project sponsored by the US Army that dealt with various aspects of cluster computing. Eventually I ended up working for a genetics research lab where I work directly with researchers to develop code for clusters (I'm also the resident HPC 'expert' so I also have to deal with things like strategic planning and purchasing/price negotiation.) The clusters are administered by the Unix/Linux support in the IT department. It is pretty tough to get into this field with a pure CS background (I did take parallel computing and modeling courses). Often biostatisticians or computational biologists will prototype their algorithms (often using matlab, R, or java), and then give me pseudocode or some other specification, and I design and program a parallel C version As for the original poster: don't waste your time building a cluster you don't need. You'll be better served practicing your programming skills. Anyone that can administer a small linux network can setup a beowulf cluster in no time - you won't learn much by doing it yourself especially since you won't have anything to do with the cluster once you get it built. -- Glen L. Beane The Jackson Laboratory Software Engineer II Phone (207) 288-6153 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
