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Date:      Thu, 18 Feb 1999 09:27:18 -0800
From:      Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com>
To:        wildcardus freakis <wildcard@dax.belen.k12.nm.us>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Beauwulf or Borg Cube?
Message-ID:  <36CC4D76.BDE47FE9@3-cities.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.990218093057.27841A-100000@dax.belen.k12.nm.us>

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wildcardus freakis wrote:
> 
>         Hello...
> 
>         A long time ago I heard that Redhat and some other Linux's were
> working on a project called Beuwulf(?) in which you could interconnect
> numerous individual PC's into a pool somewhat like the Borg
> Collective...in the pool processes, disk space, memory, etc. would be
> shared accross these machines evenly...did FreeBSD ever mess with the
> idea?  Has anyone ever heard of Linux actually doing it?
> 

Hi Sasha,

On a slightly diffent concept, do a web search on PVM (Parallel Virtual
Machine) and you can find existing code that can do parallel computing. It
is oriented around FORTRAN but some people are using setups with 20 - 200
Mhz Pentiums's to do problems. I have used f77 on FreeBSD and it doesn't do
that well. My development sessions on NT are running 15 to 45 to 1 times
faster when I compare Digital Visual Fortran to f77 on Freebsd. DVF can do a
complete build while f77 is just finishing the first line of the make.
FreeBSD is on a 166Mhz Pentium and DVF is on a dual 133 NT server. DVF can't
run in parallel and you have to balance tradeoffs.

The Beowulf evenly shared concept comes up in my book as finding the "Holy
Grail" from the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" series of movies. A lot of
manufacturers have spent a lot of money and just like everything in life,
some get treated more fairly/unfairly than others. There are some programs
that don't do well in SMP environments. The successfull SMP program is
designed for multi-threading from the first concept. I have used piping on a
multi-headed Cray and where each pipe command was running on a different cpu
and flat screamed. I don't know how Linux or FreeBSD stack up in such a
situation.

Kent

> Sasha
> 
> <muse>  I cannot be unlike what managed hubs do...interconnection but
> logicly one machine...

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com
http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html


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