[plug] Beowulf

[The Thought Assassin]

According to DarkeMane Industries:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 1998 at 05:39:26PM +0800, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> > > Has anyone looked at the Extreme Linux CD?  I just downloaded a copy, and
> > > would like to create a nice Beowulf class cluster using the PC's that I
> > > own...  Has anyone done this yet, that could give me some advice, I've
> > > read all the information and just want practical advice...
No I didn't. watch your attributions.

> learn PVM ;) a rather nifty parallel programming interface - from memory
> it is used by the beowulf people (as well as MPI of course).
Aaaah, a knowledgable-type chap?
Is there actually any support for anything other than PVM and MPI?

> but seriously - a beowulf is fine and dandy - but normal programs don't
> run any different. although there is potential for an arbitary process
> migration (on invokation). (mind wanders)
Eeek, big can-o-worms there :) If all you are interested in is running several
unparallelized apps across multiple machines, then you should probably be using
X and doing the load-balancing by hand. Or, perhaps more cost-effective, buy a
faster machine. Any heavier than that, and you'll probably find that modifying
the program itself is better than modifying the environment. Migration is a
lovely, elegant idea, (notice I don't say that the implementation is lovely or
elegant :) but it just seems to be getting squeezed to death between the low
end where hardware is improving rapidly, and local quirks can demand more
flexibility then is available from such a low-level system, and the high-end
where performance is everything, and people are prepared to rebuild their
code to cope with parallelism. I fear it is destined to be an idea that is
studied a lot, but seldom implemented.


> > ideas about your particular project, as I know at least a couple of PLUG
> > people with an interest in distributed programming/distributed systems.
> not mentioning that my final year project basically centers around
> distributed programming/systems. facinating toys they are.

Indeed. Can you send me more precise details of your project, off the list?