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