Service). I have always thought that it should be possible to build a
cluster which works like a single system. So that when I open an SSH session
to the cluster I get a connection as normal while in fact I am connecting to
the clustered system.
the ssh connection is not interesting; what happens after that _is_.
so you ssh to a cluster, and through lvs or similar, you get put onto
some node. then what? is it supposed to still "work like" a single
system? it does as long as you don't need more than one node, but
that's not only boring but begs the question of why a cluster?
making a cluster really "work like" a single system means that no
thread should be aware of the fact that some other thread is on
a different node. this means a single pid space, transparent shared
memory, etc. and even then (an SGI altix is such a machine), none
of this is transparent in a strong sense (ie, the thread will indeed
be able to tell when a cacheline is remote...)
I started reading a lot, and it seems as if this can
be done with beowulf. I just wonder if the head node would make things more
difficult (since that can go down as well). Is this at all possible (using
beowulf) and how would I go about configuring this?
are you confusing high-availability with clustering? avoiding single points
of failure is laudable, but you quickly start to move away from anything
that resembles high-performance (and necessarily start relying on more
replication and thus cost...)
I know this isn't very clear (I am just exploring), so please ask away.
well, "what do you mean?" pretty much covers it. it's certainly possible
to avoid a single login node as a single point of failure. it's also
possible to use HA techniques to avoid other SPOF's (such as where the
scheduler runs, or filesystems, etc). but "working like a single system"
is much harder.
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