On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 07:43:06AM -0400, Allen Briggs wrote:
> Heh.  I've been meaning to look at beowulf to see what's necessary to
> get it running with NetBSD.  It would be nice to have some clustering
> capabilities.

Well, if you look in /usr/pkgsrc/parallel, you'll see that we already
have ports for clusterit, glunix, mpi-ch (presumably a specific MPI
implementation, I haven't messed with it), and pvm3.

I can say from experience that the pvm3 and glunix ports are both
somewhat broken (glunix since NetBSD 1.3.x or so). I'm in the process
of fixing glunix, though (I need it for coursework).

So, point is, we *have* some clustering ability.

Beowulf, if memory serves, is vaguely specific to x86 Linux (both
byte-order-(?) and kernel-wise), as are some other cluster designs out
there (PAPERS springs to mind).

It's my own personal opinion that glunix is the best thing running,
which is why I'm tinkering with it on my own cluster of mac68k, macppc,
and sparc machines (all running NetBSD). Yes, I know most of them are
slow, that isn't the point.

I have a composed-but-not-sent PR regarding the glunix port, as I'm
pretty sure I can fix it up on my own and provide the solution along
with the whining (I've contacted the port maintainer already... the
problems seem to be bit-rot in the kmem routines and such, which he
originally got by ripping them out of top, which I can easily do again).

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net


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