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At 11:08 AM 8/6/2005, Nicholas Papadakos wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="arial" size=2>Hello,<br>
<br>
I have some machines laying around and I was thinking for the past 3-4
months to make a small Beowulf cluster.<br>
I have tried something similar in the past, but I had used the openmosix
approach.<br>
<br>
The machines are:<br>
<br>
2x <a href="mailto:p4@2.4GHZ">p4@2.4GHZ</a><br>
1x <a href="mailto:p4@2.0GHZ">p4@2.0GHZ</a><br>
1x p3@900MHZ<br>
</font></blockquote><br>
If you're just fooling around, arrange them any way you want. It's
pretty easy to rearrange things, and the information you gain from the
exercise is the most useful thing, anyway.<br><br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="arial" size=2>I was
thinking of putting the p3 to do the master node and the rest the slave
nodes( under the assumption that the master node doesn’t do anything else
than coordinating the slave nodes).<br>
Reading a bit more about beowulf I found that the master node needs
to be the most powerfull machine in the cluster? ( this is not very clear
to me if its true or not)</font></blockquote><br>
Depends on what the nodes are doing, and how much they hit the disk (or
require other services from the headnode). I will mention that you
usually wind up doing things like compiles and editing on the head node
(because it's most convenient), so having a reasonably fast processor
there is nice. I have a fairly funky cluster (battery powered, and
802.11a wireless interconnects, for instance), and virtually all the work
is done by the nodes (which are 533 MHz Via EPIA-Ms). Originally,
my head node was a 120MHz P1, figuring that all it had to do was respond
to DHCP and PXE stuff and serve out the boot image, which it did
perfectly well. What a royal pain that was, though, since I
was building that cramfs boot image on the head node, and it was
creepingly slow. <br><br>
Currently, we're hassling through getting NTP to work reliably.<br><br>
<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="arial" size=2>Should
I use the p3 as the master or one of the p4?<br>
<br>
Also , since I have several spare 100mb Ethernet cards arounds, to put 2
in each node and bonding them together. Is it worth it?<br>
</font></blockquote><br>
Try it and see how it works. Again, the experience from tinkering
is the best result from an experimental cluster. In your case,
trying to quantify the difference with bonding or not might be the more
interesting thing.<br><br>
<br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
James Lux, P.E.<br>
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group<br>
Flight Communications Systems Section<br>
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213<br>
4800 Oak Grove Drive<br>
Pasadena CA 91109<br>
tel: (818)354-2075<br>
fax: (818)393-6875<br>
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