To the outside world, a "supercomputer" appears to be a
single system. In fact, it's a cluster of computers that share a local
area network and have the ability to work together on a single problem
as a team. Many businesses used to consider supercomputing beyond the
reach of their budgets, but new Linux applications have made
high-performance clusters more affordable than ever. These days, the
promise of low-cost supercomputing is one of the main reasons many
businesses choose Linux over other operating systems.This new guide
covers everything a newcomer to clustering will need to plan, build, and
deploy a high-performance Linux cluster. The book focuses on clustering
for high-performance computation, although much of its information also
applies to clustering for high-availability (failover and disaster
recovery). The book discusses the key tools you'll need to get started,
including good practices to use while exploring the tools and growing a
system. You'll learn about planning, hardware choices, bulk installation
of Linux on multiple systems, and other basic considerations. Then,
you'll learn about software options that can save you hours--or even
weeks--of deployment time.Since a wide variety of options exist in each
area of clustering software, the author discusses the pros and cons of
the major free software projects and chooses those that are most likely
to be helpful to new cluster administrators and programmers. A few of
the projects introduced in the book include:MPI, the most popular
programming library for clusters. This book offers simple but realistic
introductory examples along with some pointers for advanced use. OSCAR
and Rocks, two comprehensive installation and administrative systems
openMosix (a convenient tool for distributing jobs), Linux kernel
extensions that migrate processes transparently for load balancing PVFS,
one of the parallel filesystems that make clustering I/O easier C3, a
set of commands for administering multiple systems Ganglia, OpenPBS, and
cloning tools (Kickstart, SIS and G4U) are also covered. The book looks
at cluster installation packages (OSCAR & Rocks) and then considers
the core packages individually for greater depth or for folks wishing
to do a custom installation. Guidelines for debugging, profiling,
performance tuning, and managing jobs from multiple users round out this
immensely useful book.
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