disadvantages of linux cluster - admin

[M A Suzen]

--On 05 November 2002 3:41pm -0800 alvin 
<alvin at Maggie.Linux-Consulting.com> wrote:

>
> hi all
>
> On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, M A Suzen wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Disadvantage of such a distributed environment would be administrative
>> and  maintaince cost as you said, apart from communication interconnect.
>> (assuming that we are comparing PC-cluster with SGI-multiproc machine)
>
> administrative and maintenance of the servers can and should be automated
> thus reducing the costs to almost zero people time
>

Only point above was commercial machines like Sun10000 or SGIOrigin, mostly
runs single operating system for n-proc machine at least end user point of 
view. In Beowulf-type solutions we have to care about n-OS, for instance
if you have heterogeneous environment (iff you have!), at least you have to
compile running program twice. Upgrading and writing automation scripts,
counts as maintenance cost. Isn't it?  Anyway, compare to
gain,boost by linux stability is worth to invest on Beowulf.