[H-GEN] HUMBUG cluster

[Andrew Pullin]

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Hi All,
    Further to the offer of 4 ppc Macs for this project, I have had a chat
with my friend who is clustering for his PHD, and we seem to have run into a
bit of a problem. Where as there _ARE_ clustering software suites that run
on Macs, and Macs _DO_ run Linux, it seems that for our purposes, this
solution is probably not suitable for a first attempt at building a Humbug
Cluster, and it will more than likely cause more technical problems than we
have limited expertise to solve.

    The major problem seems to be that many of the performance tweaks are a
bit architecture specific, and so this drastically limits our choices of
software, but even more so, it drastically reduces our support network.
There is apparently only one major Mac cluster around, and that is in the
US, and this particular exercise was done more because they could, not
because it was meant to be useful. Apparently this cluster is also running
some kind of propriety software, and folds protiens for a living. There are
some Mac clustering developers out there, but my friend believes that this
particular solution will be beyond the grasp of our small group. I did ask
about setting up Linux on Macs and compiling the Beowulf source, but this
again seems not to be a valid solution due to the architecture thing.

    So people, this seems to put us back at square 2 again (1 was getting
enough people interested to try in the first place). What we are still
looking for seems to be 4 similar Pentium Is. Remember that only one _needs_
to resemble a full system for a stand alone front end, and the other three
need only have memory, a HDD and networking capability. I think that after
investigation that this setup will meet the needs of the group, and
shouldn't be too difficult to obtain.

    To the gentleman who made the offer of the Macs, thank you on behalf of
the clustering group. We apreciate the offer, even if we are not in a
position to accept at the moment. My friend recomends that in the future,
when the group has some clustering experience, that we should tackle a Mac
cluster as a separate, advanced project. This is a good thing to have in
mind that we will have an opportunity for an advanced project and should
offer incentive for the group to advance rapidly. Over to you people. Any
comments? Offers? Others?
    Cheers!
        Andrew.


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