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