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.
