Errtu76's Journal: Beowulf!

Woohaa! I got myself a Beowulf cluster! 20 nodes of 2GHz P4's using Open-MPI. Cool. .. So what do i do with it now that i can call myself a Beowulf administrator? No idea. I don't even know if what i have now can be called a Beowulf. I thought that since this is so popular amongst geeks, there would be a plethora of documentation available, but almost all links point to the original Beowulf documentation which is just a description of how things should look like. No tutorial or practical examples. After a long search i came to the conclusion that any cluster can be called a Beowulf if it uses some form of MPI (Message Passing Interface). Now that i got this running i thought about compiling a test program that came with the open-mpi package called pi.c. An extremely simple program that calculates pi using several nodes/cpu's. Except that the more nodes i specify, the longer the calculation takes. Uhm, i don't know much (if anything) about HPC, but i don't think this is supposed to happen. Today i have more time to play with my cluster. I can either setup Hadoop on it now since the whole idea is to make a PoC on clustered filesystems, or i can try to see if i can compile something useful using MPI. Decisions decisions ...