High Performance Linux Clusters With Oscar, Rocks,openmosix, And Mpi

Rating:
Summary: Cheap open source
Review: The free open source nature of Linux has driven its growth in general purpose client and server side usages. Here, Sloan takes linux into the rarefied context of high performance computing. Atop linux, he explains the merits of open source packages like Oscar and Rocks, to run your cluster. The basic motivation for him describing all this is the relatively low cost of using the machines. This can be a significant issue if your budget is limited or if you plan to have many machines in the cluster.

The book is primarily about software. Though he also gives a chapter discussing mundane but important decisions regarding hardware. The software that is explained is mostly Oscar and Rocks, as explained above, and how these are to be run. Be aware that relatively little of the book is about linux, per se. Which is as it should be. The crucial starting assumption is that you are or will be using linux. But, roughly, linux on these machines is more or less the same as linux on a generic computer. The distinguishing feature is the next layer of software.

On the programming side, Sloan points out that C and Fortran dominate, with C++ usage rising. There is no significant effort in Java, because of its performance penalty. Maybe on the cluster's lead computer that interfaces with the rest of the world, you can have a nice Java GUI program that controls the cluster. But the heavy lifting is done in the other languages.