[lug] psuedo OT: advice on learning clusters

[Ed Hill]

On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 23:32, Hugh Brown wrote:

> I'm interested in a computational approach and developing general
> competency in a scientific cluster environment.


Hi Hugh,

Heres a few links that you might find helpful:

  OpenMosix, a "fork and forget" kernel-based way to distribute 
  workloads across multiple x86-based systems:
    http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
    [ Also a great way to turn two or more cheap-o systems into 
      a cute and useful little cluster...]

  A few "batch" or "queue oriented" ways to distribute loads 
  across multiple systems:
    http://www.openpbs.org/
    http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/
      http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/condorg/versusG.html
    http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
    http://www.platform.com/products/LSFfamily/
    http://www.mhpcc.edu/training/workshop/loadleveler/MAIN.html

  Libraries for between-node communications:
    http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/
    http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.htm

All of the above have overview or FAQ pages that will help you get an
idea of what they do and how they could fit together.

Since the early 90's, "High Performance Computing" has become more or
less synonymous with parallel computing.  And, while the way one
approaches parallel computing is (or should be) strongly dependent on
the problem features, the MPI library is used on a broad range of
applications.  For instance, its used routinely for our main project at
work and it runs on many systems:

  http://mitgcm.org/testing.html

So MPI is a good place to start if you'd like to do a little coding.

If you're mostly interested in the cluster admin aspects then
concentrate on the other groups of links.  And for a concrete cluster
example, you can see the user pages for our cluster at:

  http://mitgcm.org/projects/MITGCM_CLUSTER/

And remember, with just two (cheap) machines you can quickly build your
own (genuine!) Linux cluster at home and try out almost all of the these
cool open-source tools!  ;-)

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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