hello,

does anybody know if a beowulf cluster can contain different types of mainboard?

and if i need to rtfm what fm?

peace,

digi

Yes it could contain all sorts of devices. It could introduce some very difficult to overcome issues. We use a cluser of mixed systems and have so for many years. We finally got about have the stack as some dual quad xeon's and found they were so fast the rest of the old P4 were just slowing down the system so we turned them off.

Okay, if i try to manifest a beowulf cluster. As an amateur project.

how many mainboards is the maximum for a cluster.

What technique is used to link them together? (in short, terms of cables etc. )

What is good reading material to create this cluster.

peace,

digi

You can use a single motherboard for testing. Using virtual machines is pretty standard if your system is good enough.

I have to say this. Since you are asking such basic questions, it may be that this attempt will not prove very useful.

It is not easy to use a cluster. There are only a few ways to get a program to actually distribute across many systems. It is a very complex setup and only useful for a very limited subset of computational uses.

The web pages are also limited because the use is so limited. Only government and educational and maybe some medial uses can benefit from a true cluster. Some companies sell this technology and they don't offer free advice. The only good web pages are pretty old. Might start at rocks cluster and look up openmpi.

Sun also had a great way of distributing tasks but again that was all closed source and you had to buy hardware in the mix. To the tune of almost $80K.

Okay, eversince it is not easy to create beowulf, i might not start this project.

peace,

digi

You might want to have a look at this

https://wiki.rocksclusters.org/

or this

http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/13/32/

I set up pvm using a few VMs, so it can be done.

What is that you are trying to achieve?

If it is for a regular guy as me,

easy to understand building a cluster,

i might collect an awful lot of cheap mainboards, for a hobby project.

peace,

dagmar

My question was really what are you hoping to run on your cluster?

As jeffro pointed out, you need to write your code with parallelization in mind and even then the gains might be minimal. It really all depends on the problem, generally speaking anything that can be split up into independent chunks will parallelize easily (e.g. generating a rainbow table) for anything else: YMMV.

One more link

http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/

do not know yet, but i understand that one vm (virual machine) spreads across more mainboards.

peace.