interested in finding out about virtualisation on beowulf. The pros
and cons, what software can be used and the limitations of such
software.
virtualization does, inherently, sacrifice some performance. since
beowulf is often motivated by achieving higher performance, this is
somewhat contradictory.
Can a beowulf cluster be applied to cloud computing? Will it run xen
afaikt, "cloud computing" means
<handwave speed=vigorous> lightweight clients interacting through random,
loose, disparate connections with service-providing things over some
kind of soap-ish, webby protocols </handwave>
so sure, why not? CC is mainly about not requiring any particular
design or structure, so sure you could host your clients and servers
inside VM's under a cluster. I'm not sure I'd call it a beowulf cluster,
though.
or vmware or would an operating system-level virtualization package
such as open VZ be more suitable.
I can't see that it would make any difference. actually, I'm not sure
there would be any real need to use a VM or other container at all:
a cloud server is basically just a service definition and some sort of
IP connectivity. they could run as normal jobs on a cluster (with no
virtualization or containment.)
most of all, what's scalable?
virtualization is no friend of performance scaling. or do you mean
human-effort (TCOish) scaling? I'd guess the most human-scalable
approach would be one big SMP, or at least a few very fat nodes.
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