[Beowulf] Survey on beowulf.org -- and a drawing for a video iPod

[Sean Dilda]

Tim Cutts wrote:

> I find the initial question essentially impossible to answer.  The whole 
> point of beowulf computing is that you can build it out of almost 
> anything.  Most of the software is community driven.  The ideas are 
> community driven.  The leaders are the community, not any one company.  
> The hardware is commodity.  I can't even name one when pushed to; I 
> don't use any cluster software I had to buy, and the vendors who made my 
> hardware are pretty much incidental - I could have used anyone.
> 
> And that answer to the first question makes the subsequent questions 
> even more impossible to answer.
> 

I'm glad I'm not the only one that had that problem.   For any 
relatively large site, you're going to end up with a mostly custom 
configuration, even if you start with a vendor's products.


For the cluster I setup here at Duke, its run by open source 
applications that were pieced together by hand instead of being part of 
a packaged cluster distro.    A friend of mine used to run a 
pre-packaged setup (Rocks, I believe).  After a year of that, he came to 
me and asked how I set mine up.  He found that having everything put 
together for him meant he knew how none of the pieces worked together, 
so he was lost when something broke.  Being able to build the pieces 
himself allowed him to see how the setup worked together and be better 
able to diagnose problems on site.