[lug] psuedo OT: advice on learning clusters

[D. Stimits]

Hugh Brown wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 13:29, Ed Hill wrote:
>
> >On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 12:25, Hugh Brown wrote:
> >
> >>My company bought a 128 processor linux cluster a while back which has
> >>idled due to resource constraints.  I'm a fair linux admin w/ not much
> >>programming background or cluster experience.  I'm curious to know if
> >>there are some standard starting points (e.g. definitive guide for
> >>parallel computing) for developing proficiency in both administrating a
> >>cluster and using it as well.
> >>
> >>I guess I'm asking what the right/preferred manuals are so I can RTM.
> >
> >
> >Hi Hugh,
> >
> >It really depends on what you're going to do with the cluster.  We use
> >our clusters for computational work and the preferred tools are OpenPBS,
> >MPI, etc.  We're currently getting into "grid" technologies such as
> >globus and condor-g for our "next-gen" cluster system which is under
> >construction:
> >
> >  http://mitgcm.org/projects/ACES/about.htm
> >  http://mitgcm.org/
> >
> >But if you intend to use your cluster for other things (eg. databases)
> >then the tools mentioned above are more-or-less irrelevant.
> >
> >So what are your applications?
> >
> >Ed
>
>
> I'm interested in a computational approach and developing general
> competency in a scientific cluster environment.

Can't say I've done it myself, but MPI and Fortran are rather popular 
there. The commercial Portland compiler is also quite popular. I'd love 
to have a small cluster to do things like imaging computations on.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net