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Clarifying the differences would hep a bunch. I have talked with |
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several 'cluster' admins that had no clue about high performance |
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clustering. |
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If you call Cisco and tell them you are running a cluster they will |
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try to sell you a switch with high inbound/outbound traffic but piss |
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poor inter-port communication speeds. They try to make there switches |
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run really fast for things like HA clusters but fall short on |
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performance clusters (where everything talks to everything). Also, |
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techniques like Flat Neighborhood Networks are pointless on a HA |
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cluster but can be a god send on HPC clusters. These subtle |
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differences are actually much larger than people realize. |
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If you are planning on writing a MPI programming guide you are |
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looking at a bunch of writing. Parallel programming regardless of the |
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API used is tricky. Communication methods, shared resource processing |
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and the like make parallel programming more of an art form than just |
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another API to use. |
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One last question for you all.. Why is distcc so popular? We used it |
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on our 134 node cluster and it actually made compiling much slower |
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than just running it on one of the nodes. The network overhead killed |
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the performance gain. The only way we found that it helped was |
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writing the makefile itself to take advantage of parallelism. Is this |
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uncommon for most people? |
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On Apr 11, 2006, at 7:47 AM, busby@××××××.com wrote: |
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|
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>> Hanni Ali wrote: |
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> [ Snip ] |
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>> Maybe a split in HA-Clustering, HPC-clustering and large-scale |
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>> sysadmin |
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>> with gentoo. |
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>> The large-scale sysadmin is overlapping for both, HA can be |
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>> usefull in |
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>> smaller setups, HPC is seldomly used in small setup AFAIK |
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> [ Snip ] |
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> |
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> I agree; different topics different sections. |
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> I'd like to see something like: |
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> |
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> Gentoo Cluster Handbook |
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> I. Sys Admin Requirements - What reader must know before moving |
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> forward |
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> (maybe describe clustering types here?) |
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> II. SysAdmin for Clusters - tools/support servers/etc |
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> III. HA Clustering - web/email failover/etc |
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> IV. HPC Clustering - batch processing/etc |
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> V. Intro to MPI - Merge the other MPI howto and add some? |
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> |
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> And of course each volume is full of useful information |
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> |
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> /djb |
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> |
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> -- |
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> gentoo-cluster@g.o mailing list |
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> |
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|
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-- |
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