General Cliuster and Performance Tuning

[Christia C Di Donato]

Hello, 

I'm pretty knew to the whole cluster thing and am about to build (out of
curiosity mostly) a beowulf cluster of approx 5 - 6 nodes with an SMP
machine in the middle.

I am asking a couple of really general questions so for the moment be
patient with me ;)

First of all what open source applications benfit from clusters and
which should I run (or any recommendations) on this particular cluster.

Second of all with performance tuning on a particluar cluster I know it
goes on more or less the spec of the machine (and network) but also the
application you are running. Is there any application or somewhere I can
go to do a little more research on.

Thanks in Advance 

Very much appreicated on any replys.


Kind Regards

Christian Di Donato