Beowulf clusters?

[superraton01]

please let me know about your Beowulf
cluster experiences, good or bad. I am a
student at mesa college in sandiego,calif.
thanx! =)

[Sharpy]

I'm sure there are people here who know exactley what a "Beowulf
cluster experience" is but unfortunatly i'm not one of them. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

Could ya gimme a clue or even a link to more info?

Cheers.

[superraton01]

in a regular network (LAN) the workstations
access the server which has most or all
of the hard drive memory. the workstations can also access each others printers,etc.
In a beowulf cluster the clients
are frequently dumb (no keyboard,monitor,
or mouse). the server divides up any task
it is given between all the clients, and
pools all the ram and cpu power. so eight (8)
comps of 500 mhz each act like one supercomputer of 4000mhz together. the software starts
with linux redhat and gets WAY WAY more
complicated from there.
link to beowulf.org.

[krusty the klown]

http://www.beowulf-underground.org/
http://www.extremelinux.org/
http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen/beowulf-faq.txt
http://www.beowulf.org/howto/howto.html
http://aggregate.org/KLAT2/

[WildCajun]

As for as RC5 is concerned. The overhead of a cluster is unneeded. The best way to implement for RC5 is C.O.W.S or ( Collection of Workstations ) the main computer has hard drive monitor etc. The other machines need only a floppy, ram and a network card. Boot from the floppy and start the client send blocks to PProxy on the main machine. Total blocks are greater this way than by implementing clusters since RC5 was designed to run distributed and not parallel

[reddog4629]

http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/

[Sharpy]

Ok Ok so everyone but me knew what it was.

Well thanks for all the info and links.

I learn something new every day.

Today i learned how dumb i am. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[Wiruz]

When cracking rc5 - your own computer is more or less turned into a beowulf node.

it would be smarter to build a herd than a cluster - RC5 is not optimized for that sort of parallel processing.

Am i right?

~Wiruz

[superraton01]

RC5 is a distributed computing app,not parallel, but having a local cluster works as
one supercomputer and should be transparent
outsidde the cluster becauseonly the
"server" isconnectedto the net. please
correct meif im wrong.

[Wiruz]

I just gave it some thought:

IF you were to run it on a beowulff cluster, i think the best way would be to run a number of crunchers equal to the number of cpu's in the cluster.

I don't think that u can have more than one CPU working on a workunit: in dual processor systems, u need one cruncher for each CPU.

~Wiruz