Posted by Kenneth Farmer, Monday December 12 2005 @ 11:45AM EST
ClusterMonkey: Clustering seems almost too good to be true. If you have work that needs to be done in a hurry, buy ten systems and get done in a tenth of the time. If only it worked with kids and the dishes. Alas, kids and dishes or cluster nodes and tasks, linear speedup on a divvied up task is too good to be true, according to Amdahl's Law, which strictly limits the speedup your cluster can hope to achieve.
In the first two columns we explored parallel speedup on a simple NOW(network of workstations) style cluster using the provided task and taskmaster program. In the last column, we observed that there were some fairly compelling relations between the amount of work that we were doing in parallel on the nodes, the amount of communications overhead associated with starting the jobs up and receiving their results, and the speedup of the job as we split it up on more and more nodes.
IDC: Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer Blade Solution
Analysis of the Xtreme-X architecture and management system while assessing challenges and opportunities in the technical computing market for blade servers. Video - The Road to PetaFlop Computing
Explore the Scalable Unit concept where multiple clusters of various sizes can be rapidly built and deployed into production. This new architectural approach yields many subtle benefits to dramatically lower total cost of ownership.
SpyderByte.com
SpyderByte.com
