Cluster pt 1. Hardware

For many years I wanted to have a cluster. Mostly for the challenge of setting it up, but also to learn about what kinds of applications work best in a clustered environment.I started with a group of identical 486 boxes purchased from Laclede Computer Trading. These were adequate machines to learn to build with, but I quickly outstripped them, mostly because the OS'es dont support the old hardware they have. That turns out to be a real pity, and I always thought that that was an advantage that Linux had - it would support old hardware longer than other OS'es would. It turns out that if you use a mainstream linux distro, you're locking yourself out of alot of options that could give the hobbyist an advantage - mostly price.These days, I have five pentium III nodes each with 128 MB Ram. Not much but I'm not really going for performance, I want to see the cluster work, if we build a useful applicaiton, then we put more memory in there.My office donated four more machines to me, so soon I'll have nine nodes.There are disadvantages to having a heterogeneous farm of machines - mostly that you need to have all the drivers for each node included in the kernel, and orchestrating that is a hassle.

Cluster f**k of a situation

Well, as you can see not much activity over here lately.

I'm busy as HELL at work. I'm building things here at home, trying to fix my toilet, and working on getting the cluster in the basement to run MM5. In the process of doing that, I tried to upgrade the OpenSSI clustering tools that i was using.

That was a mistake, because now i've broken the cluster completely, and have to start from scratch. I really loved that OpenSSI toolkit. it made getting up and running super easy. Now, there are certain things built into the OS, but there's not really a set of tools that you can use to build the environment that I want, and make it easy-one-stop-shopping.

So, I'm going to begin to document my experiences re-building the cluster in a set of articles here.

Enjoy.