linuxgeek: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Which is the best?

Thursday, December 10, 2009

[LINUX_Newbies] Re: Which is the best?

A Beowulf cluster sounds neat and all, but unless you have jobs which run on applications optimized for such parallelization, it is somewhat useless.

Also, the speed of the interconnection between machines is very important for many tasks. I'd think at the very minimum gigabit Ethernet would be highly desirable...and the way they are networked has a great deal to do with the success of the cluster. (Serious Beowulf clusters use much faster connections than Ethernet, due to the high overhead involved with it. However, many of those methods require very expensive hardware components to work...look at Infiniband as one common example in that kind of system.)

The manner in which you connect the cluster will also be important...if everything has to run through the control computer, for example, it can impede performance.

That said, it can be a fascinating way to increase your knowledge, especially if you are prepared to do the programming work to take advantage of a compute cluster.

One kind of job for which a cluster like that would make sense would be if you are doing computer animation, complete with ray tracing for natural lighting effects. That is why movie studios use it for animated films, after all.

Otherwise, a straight network is what most home and small business users need most.

David

--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "loyal_barber" <loyal_barber@...> wrote:
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>
>
> See below
>
> --- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "michaelfirefox@" <michaelfirefox@> wrote:
> >
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I am a newbie <snip>
> >
> > Right now I use ubuntu 9.10 <snip>
> >
> > This is my question: I am thinking about creating an private network
> > or a beowolf system.