Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3506 mails)

["Peter Van Lone" <petervl@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/21/06, M Harris <harrismh777@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have experimented with this at home... most folks have one large more or
> less state-of-the-art pc with the latest toys attached... it goes down... and
> they're in the shop for a while.
>
> My system is a distributed cluster of 14 older systems that never goes down.
> It is completely redundant, lightning fast, with self backup, mirroring, and
> processor sharing.  And the cool thing is that authorized users (member of
> the household) can logon from one of five terminals (also nodes in the
> network) and access the entire cluster (or individual machines) including
> graphical interfaces to any of the nodes on the cluster if need be. Its fun,
> its fast, its reliable, and its cheap....

despite the power issues for a home user, I want to start playing in
this sand box, too ...

will you discuss a bit the hardware and software resources you have
marshalled in your HPC? What interconnect - just GB ethernet? What
linux distro and cluster packages?

It would be way cool -- if you had an itch -- to write up a "what I
did and how I did it". If you are using suse, then the suse wiki would
be a good home. Or a "cool solutions" acticle.

Anyway ... I found it interesting, and I believe that "grid" kinds of
computing are, indeed, the future. It's kind of like ethernet ... as
speeds get faster and faster, the MAC protocols underlying ethernet
are not the best/most efficient/easiest to grow. But, because everyone
knows and uses ethernet, it *ends up* being the architecture of newer
and newer technologies.

Well, linux and commodity x86 hardware *may not* be *the best* way to
scale out, but ... I believe it will dominate.

Peter