[CentOS] does anyone have experience with clusters?

Wed Dec 3 15:30:18 UTC 2008
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Rudi Ahlers wrote:

> What I'm looking for, is how to build what is called a super computer.
> Google used to, or still even does this, where they put hundreds of
> computers into the same "cluster" / super computer, and end up with a
> 1 huge hard drive, and plenty of RAM to use :)

Doing this is really only useful for very specialized applications,
do not expect this to work normally for most off the shelf/off the
repository applications.

If you want a global file system look into AFS, it can do what you
want I believe. Though I would not use AFS for anything like MySQL
or Xen. AFS is extremely complicated but does provide a real generic
distributed file system.

Don't even bother going down the route where you cluster the memory
together, latency will kill performance, and again you need very
specialized apps to use it.

And in any sort of disk/ram clustering performance will generally
be shit until you have many nodes.

Basically what I'm saying here is, based on your past posts you don't
appear to be an extremely experienced admin/developer so what you
are wanting to do will not work the way you hope it might. So don't
waste any more time and drop the idea.

nate