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High Performance Linux Clusters with OSCAR, Rocks, OpenMosix, and MPI (Nutshell Handbooks)
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High Performance Linux Clusters with OSCAR, Rocks, OpenMosix, and MPI (Nutshell Handbooks) |
Author: Joseph Sloan
Published: 2004-11-16 |
List price: $39.95
Our price: $26.37
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: November 20th, 2008 03:42:48 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 OSCAR info badly out of date
I recently installed an OSCAR cluster on our PowerEdge SC1425 servers; Since the book just came out this year, I thought it would provide some more up to date insights into items that are not included in the install manual.
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br /No such luck, you will find no mention of the need to upgrade SIS if you have SCSI or S-ATA drives, there is no information on Peter Mueller's kernel, or why you may need it. Or why the whole process seems to work but the nodes never can boot (OSCAR sometimes makes a bad initrd.img - check the size).
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br /This book is NOT a good OSCAR resource, if you're a newbie it just leave you feeling frustrated as to why it sounds so simple and just doesn't work.
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 Cheap open source
The free open source nature of Linux has driven its growth in general purpose client and server side usages. Here, Sloan takes linux into the rarefied context of high performance computing. Atop linux, he explains the merits of open source packages like Oscar and Rocks, to run your cluster. The basic motivation for him describing all this is the relatively low cost of using the machines. This can be a significant issue if your budget is limited or if you plan to have many machines in the cluster.
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br /The book is primarily about software. Though he also gives a chapter discussing mundane but important decisions regarding hardware. The software that is explained is mostly Oscar and Rocks, as explained above, and how these are to be run. Be aware that relatively little of the book is about linux, per se. Which is as it should be. The crucial starting assumption is that you are or will be using linux. But, roughly, linux on these machines is more or less the same as linux on a generic computer. The distinguishing feature is the next layer of software.
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br /On the programming side, Sloan points out that C and Fortran dominate, with C++ usage rising. There is no significant effort in Java, because of its performance penalty. Maybe on the cluster's lead computer that interfaces with the rest of the world, you can have a nice Java GUI program that controls the cluster. But the heavy lifting is done in the other languages.
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