Clustering

Eric Shubert ejs at shubes.net
Mon Jun 29 18:29:11 MST 2009


I'm looking at clustering together a handful of hosts, each running dual 
nvidia tesla cards. Modeling applications of some sort. I honestly don't 
know much more than that.

Michael Butash wrote:
> 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?".
>>
> 


-- 
-Eric 'shubes'



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