i'm going to be setting up a cluster at school and was wondering if anyone here has done this. as of now we have 12 10/100 network cards (i know, 100 is slow for this, but i did not pick them out) and 6 computers (p3 i think)

so who has done this? any tips? what is the best distro for clustering? and what programs do i need?

i was hoping to end up with a system that looks from a programs point of view as a computer with just 6 CPUs, is that possible or do i have to use special programs to distribute the load to the other programs and/or compile the program special for the cluster?

I'm also interested in the replies. I found this thread that might help: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/02/1/141140

I'm actually about to start a cluster at my school aswell with 8 dual PII Celeron 550s (don't ask why Intel decided to dual Celerons).

I havn't started yet, but am debating whether or not to use ClusterKnoppix. Anybody else use this? Good? Bad? Ugly?

What are you going to be doing with the cluster?

Remember, you are limited to 100Mbps throughput on the system. That is a huge bottleneck, so dont count on anything being like a computer with six CPU's.

Having them work back and forth as one main computer, would be a waste.

But having them all work together on one very large chunk of data, something like tens of gigabytes of video to encode would be easy.

The memory bus between my computers cpu and the ram is around 51000Mbps (DDR400). 100Mbps ethernet shared between 5 or 6 or 20 computers is a very small thing to be working with.

It really doesnt matter if you have 10Gbps ethernet, the computers really wont work well in a cluster on small bits of data. Ethernet is always going to be a bottleneck.

There is something out for apache, which seems fairly simple.

One master controller computer is hooked to the internet/network source, it acceps all the incoming connections, looks at the clustered apache comptuers, figures out which IP's go where to balance out the load, and thats about it.

as i see it now, its more so that we can say we have a cluster and that we made it, as i don't see any use for it either, so far we have decided that since the people who purchased the NICs thought that 12 100Mbps cards as one input and one output card per comp (what what were they thinking) would be best, but we have since decided that a master with 5 cards and 5 clients each with a card would be the best, that gives us 500Mbps each way from the master (100Mbps per comp), still slow, but not as bad


looking at the ClusterKnoppix link provided they mention blender3d, i may just end up benchmarking that.....and that distro does look good, i'm going to give it a test run