Building a Beowulf Cluster…
For a few years now, I have been wanting to build a Beowulf Cluster… however, the cost of such a project has just became within range with the prices of memory and processors steadily on the decline.
For those of you who do not know what a Beowulf Cluster is… it is a collection of personal computers that are connected together to acheive high performance computing. Google it to see some pretty cool pictures (if you are into that sort of thing).
I do not have the funding of a enterprise company, a university, a hospital, a research center, or some government… so the cluster I build will be relatively small in comparison. My plan is to start off with 5 nodes, including the server… and add nodes as I streamline the process.
Primarily, I am doing this to mentally torture myself… really just to learn more about parallel programming. In the process, I may be able to offer researchers the ability to simulate chemical reactions, atmospheric modeling, protein folding for cancer research, physics simulations, etc… or in the end, I may just have one huge system to serve all of my favorite games 24/7.
I was starting off with setting up the master node with Fedora Core 8. Which was a mistake, because OSCAR does not support it yet. So, I can either drop back to an older version of Fedora, change Linux distributions to say… Redhat… or, download the source from their subversion directory and modify the code and recompile it… thereby creating support for Fedora 8 myself. The SVN content is still downloading… Pending how much time I anticipate wasting, I may just switch distros or replace OSCAR with a different clustering utility.
More later…