[SunRescue] Re: New Netra

[David Cantrell]

Reagen Ward <ward at zilla.nu> wrote:
  
> I know you were kidding, but it made me think of something.  I regularly
> hear comments about building Beowulf clusters, and maybe one of these days
> I'll get someone to tell me just what they would do with a one.  So few
> apps can use MPI / PVM / whatever, the uses of one are quite limited.

Not necessarily.  True, using PVM you're very limited in what you can do,
but take a look at Mosix.  It's a fairly hefty kernel patch for Linux which
claims to parallelise apps which were not necesarily compiled against any
special libraries.  At the Linuxbierwanderung 2000, we built two Beowulf
clusters.  One using PVM and one using Mosix.  Whilst neither performed
spectacularly* the Mosix one did work.  Mosix also claims to be fault-
tolerant, although we didn't try that.

This year's LBW will be in Belgium in late August or early September.  I
plan to take a pile of Sun stuff with me and my SGI Indy which *should*
be Linuxed up by then.  Other rescuers welcome.

* - because they were built using any old hardware which people donated,
so the machines weren't that well specced, they were not balanced, they
used 10bT hubs instead of 100bT switches, etc etc etc

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/

   Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced