Dear Beowulf Community: I'm building my first cluster and wanted to express thankfulness for the community resources here. I've been reading about clustering here and at clustermonkey.net and my hardware is arriving this week. In fact, my power supplies and CPUs arrived today.
I'm going to be adding 2 nodes of dual opteron machines to my existing dual opteron workstation to make a 3 node 6 processor (all single core) cluster. This is being done from personal funds and will be used to support my doctoral research in computational chemistry. However, as much as I'd like to learn clustering, the research has to come first and I'm prepared to fall back to a 3 workstation setup if I fail miserably at cluster implementation. Each machine will have 4 Gb RAM, and I may upgrade RAM as budget permits (which means each machine will have 4 Gb RAM, at least until I've finished my PhD program). In order to be able to fall back to the three workstations if needed, each machine will have a 80 - 120 Gb hard drive. I'm probably going to use SUSE Professional 9.1 as my distribution (my PGI 5.2 compilers don't run on OpenSUSE 10.2 - I've tried the suggestions to fix this from pgroup.com forums but they didn't work - I'd be happy for further ideas regarding this issue). Other than just saying hello here, I do have a question. For this modest sized cluster, how important is it to have a cluster manager like OSCAR? Will it be just as time consuming to just learn a flavor of MPI as it would be to learn to use OSCAR (for example)? I will primarily be using CPMD for my calculations, but may want to try out abinit and DFT++. Thanks, Mark Kosmowski Syracuse University Syracuse, NY US _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
