discuss: Beowulf howto
Subject:
Re: Beowulf howto
From:
"s. keeling" ####@####.####
Date:
13 May 2004 15:29:30 -0000
Message-Id: <20040513152910.GB5067@infidel.spots.ab.ca>
Incoming from Ruth A. Kramer:
> Kurt wrote:
> > Earlier this year I submitted a proposed beowulf howto, and you expressed
> > concerns about security.
>
> was a HOWTO also, so maybe the tldp list). They "assumed" that it would
> not cause anybody any problems and asked if anybody still uses dialup
fwiw, lots of people do still use dialup (including me). However,
considering estimates are %50 - %80 of network traffic nowadays is
Spam, I expect people must be getting used to wasting half their
investment in handling cruft.
There are large chunks in the world who are still effectively without
net access; lots of Africa remains un-wired. Then there's politics,
dictatorial regimes, and plain censorship that continue to cut off
others.
> It may be out of your intended scope for the document, but I didn't find
> any guidance on why someone might want a Beowulf cluster. Treating this
I think that would be a valid comment to make. Every scientific paper
starts out with a paragraph or two summarizing the contents of the
rest of the paper. HOWTOs should be no different.
> I have several computers set up on my local home network (old and cheap)
You may benefit from NIS/NFS, networked machines, and all the other
things a LAN can do for you. You can be sitting at the smallest, most
anaemic box on the LAN, then start up some huge application on your
big Duron but direct its results/display back to the tiny box you're
sitting at. That's the kind of thing X Window was designed for.
> * Would a Beowulf cluster automatically take tasks from my
> workstation and run them elsewhere on the cluster to improve the speed,
That's plain old LAN + X Window.
> * Any other benefits to running a Beowulf cluster?
The only benefit to running Beowulf is if you have _an application_
whose way of doing things lends itself to distributed processing. If
it does large things which can be broken up into smaller, discrete
tasks, then brought together at the end of processing to produce the
result, that's Beowulf. There's not really all that many applications
for this sort of thing. Simulating weather patterns, engineering
modelling, materials analysis, and that sort of thing would lend
itself toward Beowulf. On the other hand, running a Quake (game)
server would not.
--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling
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