How old is the old cluster? You might actually spend more time trying to get the nodes all working than you’d save by having them as a compute element. I’ve looked at piles of computers in my garage and thought “hey, I should cluster them” and then, I realize that the discount laptop I can buy for a few hundred bucks will blow the combination away.
So, unless you’re “learning how to build a cluster”, I wouldn’t think that’s the way to go. And for the “how to bring up a cluster tinkering”, a batch of rPi or beagles and a cheap switch is probably cheaper and more reflective of modern distros. OTOH, if your three old nodes are a year old, then have at it. From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org> on behalf of "jaquil...@eagleeyet.net" <jaquil...@eagleeyet.net> Date: Saturday, February 1, 2020 at 10:45 PM To: Mark Kosmowski <mark.kosmow...@gmail.com>, "beowulf@beowulf.org" <beowulf@beowulf.org> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about today Hi Mark, So you are going to revive your old 3 node cluster and expand that? I would suggest if you are looking to expand the cluster I would look at the ryzen epyc rome 2 the second generation of these chips is quite impressive in the sense you can do double the amount of 2 single intel chips. They vary from 8 core 16 threads up to 64 core 128 threads. Also you don’t have all these issues that intel are currently facing with 7nm process as well as the vulnerabilities. I just moved my gaming pc from a 6th gen i7 to a ryzen 5 3600 6 core 12 thread machine and im seeing a huge difference in performance. Regards, Jonathan Aquilina EagleEyeT Phone +356 20330099 Sales – sa...@eagleeyet.net<mailto:sa...@eagleeyet.net> Support – supp...@eagleeyet.net ___________________________________________________________________________________________ From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org>> On Behalf Of Mark Kosmowski Sent: Sunday, 2 February 2020 04:21 To: beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org> Subject: [Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about today I've been out of computation for about 20 years since my master degree. I'm getting into the game again as a private individual. When I was active Opteron was just launched - I was an early adopter of amd64 because I needed the RAM (maybe more accurately I needed to thoroughly thrash my swap drives). I never needed any cluster management software with my 3 node, dual socket, single core little baby Beowulf. (My planned domain is computational chemistry and I'm hoping to get to a point where I can do ab initio catalyst surface reaction modeling of small molecules (not biomolecules).) I'm planning to add a few nodes and it will end up being fairly heterogenous. My initial plan is to add two or three multi-socket, multi-core nodes as well as a 48 port gigabit switch. How should I assess whether to have one big heterogenous cluster vs. two smaller quasi-homogenous clusters? Will it be worthwhile to learn a cluster management software? If so, suggestions? Should I consider Solaris or illumos? I do plan on using ZFS, especially for the data node, but I want as much redundancy as I can get, since I'm going to be using used hardware. Will the fancy Solaris cluster tools be useful? Also, once I get running, while I'm getting current with theory and software may I inquire here about taking on a small, low priority academic project to make sure the cluster side is working good? Thank you all for still being here!
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