Subject: Re: Clustering Software on CD
To: Jan Schaumann <jschauma@netmeister.org>
From: Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>
List: tech-cluster
Date: 07/07/2005 22:59:49
On Thu, 7 Jul 2005, Jan Schaumann wrote:
>> Second, there seems to be very little documentation about how to use
>> netbsd in a clustered environment, and what little documentation is
>> haphazard at best. I read about netbsd cluster used in some Marathon
>> picture splicing, but it didn't say anything about what software was used
>> for clustering.
>
> I can't speak for that environment myself (Hubert, can you chip in?),
The "Marathon Cluster" used hand-made load balancing for the first phase
of the project (splitting mpeg streams into images), and mpeg_encode,
which we used in the second step, did all the load balancing over a given
number of machines itself. Quite straight forward.
Of course we had a common filesystem (NFS) for all machines, and the
applications were available on all clients, but that's what you have to
provide in any cluster. If you know how to run a cluster of lab machines
for students, you should have all the knowledge you need to run such a
cluster, too.
Dunno what else to tell - all this "clustering" is mostly a hype IMO. :)
As for the documentation, there's a bunch available at
http://www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/intro-en.html, documentation (both
german and english language) is linked at the german language cluster page
at the bottom of http://www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/intro.html, esp.
http://www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/mc-paper.pdf.
If you need more information, I'd be interested in knowing what kind of
information you need.
- Hubert