To the outside world, a "supercomputer" appears to be a single system. In fact, it's a cluster of computers that share a local area network and have the ability to work together on a single problem as a team. Many businesses used to consider supercomputing beyond the reach of their budgets, but new Linux applications have made high-performance clusters more affordable than ever. These days, the promise of low-cost supercomputing is one of the main reasons many businesses choose Linux over other operating systems. This new guide covers everything a newcomer to clustering will need to plan, build, and deploy a high-performance Linux cluster. The book focuses on clustering for high-performance computation, although much of its information also applies to clustering for high-availability (failover and disaster recovery). The book discusses the key tools you'll need to get started, including good practices to use while exploring the tools and growing a system. You'll learn about planning, hardware choices, bulk installation of Linux on multiple systems, and other basic considerations. Then, you'll learn about software options that can save you hours--or even weeks--of deployment time. Since a wide variety of options exist in each area of clustering software, the author discusses the pros and cons of the major free software projects and chooses those that are most likely to be helpful to new cluster administrators and programmers. A few of the projects introduced in the book include:

• MPI, the most popular programming library for clusters. This book offers simple but realistic introductory examples along with some pointers for advanced use.

• OSCAR and Rocks, two comprehensive installation and administrative systems

• openMosix (a convenient tool for distributing jobs), Linux kernel extensions that migrate processes transparently for load balancing

• PVFS, one of the parallel filesystems that make clustering I/O easier

• C3, a set of commands for administering multiple systems

Ganglia, OpenPBS, and cloning tools (Kickstart, SIS and G4U) are also covered. The book looks at cluster installation packages (OSCAR & Rocks) and then considers the core packages individually for greater depth or for folks wishing to do a custom installation. Guidelines for debugging, profiling, performance tuning, and managing jobs from multiple users round out this immensely useful book.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 2 Ratings

OSCAR info badly out of date - 2005-09-20
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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).

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.

Forget openMosix part. - 2009-10-23
Reviewer Rating:
Just wanted to mention that openMosix - which is proposed in the book as an attractive component for the cluster, was discontinued in March, 2008. Right now I'm working with other parts such as Oscar, using the book more as a guideline than as a howto manual - nevertheless, it handles a very easy language and explains very clearly most concepts.

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