Clustering

[Michael Butash]

You're probably talking infiniband switching, infiniband hba's,
pci-e/htx interfaces, fiber channel disk arrays, etc.  Linux seems to
support infiniband hba's reasonably well, and 10g 4x infiniband hba's
tend to be cheap these days on ebay.  We're talking $100 used hba's for
the nodes, and ~$1200 for a 12 port Cisco/Topspin switch.  I thought
about buying some to play with, as it ends up cheaper than IP or Fiber
channel technologies, yet can replace them all to some extents.

IB is quite versatile, emulating fiber-channel, IP network, or raw
interrupt switching to a cpu and memory via different driver socket
interface api's.  Cray always used a similar means to make theirs with
proprietary north bridge and software, but IB is more of a standard now,
enabling (relatively) cheap supercomputing on the fly with commodity
hardware.  Well, hardware-wise at least...

So yeah, what apps are you talking about utilizing it?

-mb


On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 13:47 -0700, Matt Graham wrote:
> From: Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net>
> > Has anyone here implemented any clusters?
> 
> I've only set one up, but I maintain the ones that my predecessors
> set up.  It's not rocket science. 
> 
> > Is any particular distro better or worse at clustering?
> 
> Not really.  Every distro has heartbeat/DRBD/LVS available.
> 
> > Any pointers regarding clustering you'd like to share?
> 
> Define the problem you're trying to solve more rigorously than just
> "clustering" first.  Do you want flailover between 2 boxes?  Do you
> want a frontend box with N service-providing boxes behind it?  The
> answers to that greatly affect what you will end up doing, as does
> the question "What services is this cluster going to provide?"  
> 
> Basically, all I can do is handwave without answers to "what services?"
> and "how many machines?".
>