[Beowulf] G5 beowulf cluster

[Dean Johnson]

On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 12:27 -0600, Carlos Lopez Nataren wrote:
> Hello, we, at the physics institute in Mexico have got four Xserve G5
> and we would like to use them as a beowulf, my first doubt is about what
> operating system to use, we've been using linux for our other clusters,
> even a G4 one, but I haven't seen anything about G5, is there a linux
> distribution that runs well on this type of machines? or do I better use
> the operating system they came with? or are there any documentation out
> there outlining the way they should be configured to be used as a
> beowulf?
> 

The native OSX should be fine. It sort depends on the applications that
you intend on using. Lots of the major apps seem to have efforts to make
them work well on the altivec machines. There was a problem, something
about semaphores I believe, that caused problems with MPI apps. I ran
into it trying to get benchmark numbers for Amber and Gromacs on 4 G5
towers that I was playing with.

	-Dean