Cluster Urban Legends: Build Your Cluster With Facts Not Fiction
Just like there are “Urban Legends” that never seem to die, so it seems there are “Cluster Urban Legends” that persist even today. We have all seen or heard them. As a service to those entering the cluster HPC (High Performance Computing) community, we dispel some of the more popular tales. (Read: misconceptions.)
Just like there are “urban legends” that never seem to die, so it seems there are “cluster urban legends” that persist even today. We’ve all seen or heard them — wacky things people say about HPC clusters. As a service to those entering the cluster HPC (High Performance Computing) community, I’ve decided to dispel some of my personal favorites. Hopefully, these legends (misconceptions) will eventually fade, but then again, this is the Internet Age. Pay particular attention if you considering building or engineering a cluster. Understanding these key concepts is the first step.
1. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
This comment/joke is seen often on Slashdot when there is some new processor, computer, video game, cluster, or whatever. My answer, of course is, “No, not really.” Just connecting things does not make a usable cluster.
At the beginning and end of the day, HPC is all about price-to-performance. Whatever you connect must make sense. Connecting a bunch of old Pentium II systems to equal the performance of a single Opteron may make sense if you are building a rendering farm, but may be a bad idea if you want to calculate the weather for next week.
So what is a cluster? Let’s define it as a collection of workers that communicate to produce a large amount of work. In computer terms, it’s computer hardware connected with a some form of communication medium (Gigabit Ethernet for example).
So here is the first thing…
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