From owner-freebsd-questions Mon May 10 19: 1:55 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailhub.scl.ameslab.gov (mailhub.scl.ameslab.gov [147.155.137.127]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B0A6F15561 for ; Mon, 10 May 1999 19:01:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov) Received: from demios.ether.scl.ameslab.gov ([147.155.137.54]) by mailhub.scl.ameslab.gov with esmtp (Exim 1.90 #1) id 10h1sO-0007ZX-00; Mon, 10 May 1999 21:02:32 -0500 Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 21:01:43 -0500 From: Guy Helmer To: rick hamell Cc: "Samer, Michael, IN" , "FreeBSD Questions (E-Mail)" Subject: Re: Cluster?! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 10 May 1999, rick hamell wrote: > > Does anyone have experience (on universities or research) with Cluster and > > the efficency? Efficiency depends on the distributed application :-) If your app doesn't require extremely low latency or extremely high bandwidth for its interprocessor communication, then it ought to run well. A sample app that I use for benchmarking runs at 78% efficiency (e.g., 0.78 * 64 * the speed of the app on a single PPro 200) on 64 PPro-200 processors connected with Fast Ethernet (although the PC's are running Linux). Some apps run very well on clusters, and other apps run poorly. > I don't know how much Alphas cost versus regular PCs, but you may > want to take a look at Beowulf. I've heard several reports of people > running it under FreeBSD, including an unconfirmed inside sourse at NASA. > There are several commercial clustering programs also, though I do not > know the name of them off the top of my head. A basic cluster is just a group of PC's connected with a fast network. Since Bill Paul recently added a driver for the NetGear GE620 ($330!) Gigabit Ethernet card to FreeBSD, one can build the cluster around a really fast network for a moderate amount of money. > Anyways if you run several fast PC's PII-400s or so with FreeBSD > in a clusterd environment you should see quite a bit of performance, and > a large cost savings. The best part (IMHO) of using the PCs, you can swap > new ones in and out easily, and be cost-effective at doing so. Or, you can buy a cluster of new systems and distribute the old systems to be used as desktop PC's :-) Guy Helmer, Ph.D. Candidate, Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science Research Assistant, Ames Laboratory --- ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov Research Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science --- ghelmer@cs.iastate.edu http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~ghelmer To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message