cluster frustrations
Joachim Worringen
joachim at lfbs.RWTH-Aachen.DE
Wed Jan 16 10:36:09 PST 2002
Peter Lindgren wrote:
> A reference showing how many OTHER people can manage to install clusters:
> http://Beowulf-underground.org/success.html
> proving I must be the village idiot.
;-)
I'm quite confident that you're not the vi. I bet that 30% of those
"success stories" already ceased to exist as such, 50% are having
similar problems to yours and 20% are running "perfectly".
I.e., I use a cluster (9 Quad-Xeon nodes) which the computing centre
here in Jülich has built and is maintaining. It runs stable. with kernel
2.2, Myrinet and GM 1.1.3 - but with really unsatisfactory
(communication) performance. But they don't get it to run reliably with
the current Linux/GM/MPICH versions which of course should run faster,
better, nicer. I don't blame Linux or Myrinet for these problems - I
just want to show that even people capable of running Crays, SP-2s,
Paragon, any kind of workstatons etc. have a hard time setting up and
maintaining a Linux cluster. And the next update is usually the next
nightmare.
Joachim
--
| _ RWTH| Joachim Worringen
|_|_`_ | Lehrstuhl fuer Betriebssysteme, RWTH Aachen
| |_)(_`| http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/~joachim
|_)._)| fon: ++49-241-80.27609 fax: ++49-241-80.22339
More information about the Beowulf
mailing list