Cluster Books

Cluster Monkey has links to all the books mentioned below.

Seraching has reveiled eleven books on clusters. A group of four books are based on the efforts of Thomas Sterling. The first book, "How to Build a Beowulf", Sterling, Salmon, Becker, Savarese, (1999, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-69218-X), is now a bit outdated. It does have some relevant parts, but most of the software it discusses is now considered old. The follow-on book by Sterling, "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux", (2002, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-69274-0), is a collection of topics edited by Thomas Sterling. The book contains a large amount of useful information from prominent community members It should be noted that he has also edited a book entitled "Beowulf Cluster computing with Windows" (ISBN ISBN 0-262-69275-92) which shares some of the content with the Linux book. There is now an updated edition of the Linux version, edited by William Gropp, Ewing Lusk (in addition to Sterling). This version provides a very good, but high level view of Linux HPC clustering. It includes ROCKS and OSCAR coverage plus other important issues (ISBN 0-262-69292-93, 504 pages).

Robert Brown has a freely available book entitled "Engineering a Beowulf-Style Compute Cluster " in which the design and construction of Beowulf style clusters is presented.

A good background book is "In Search of Clusters" by Gregory Pfister (1997 ISBN 0138997098, 608 pages). The book was written in the pre-Beowulf era but has some very good technical analysis in it.

There are two books which I consider rather dated. The first is called "Linux Cluster Architecture", Alex Vrenios, (2002, Sams, ISBN 0-672-32368-0). This book describes how to build a small cluster based on Linux, however, it misses a large part of the software that is used on HPC clusters today. The second is called "Linux Clustering", Charles Bookman, New Riders, (ISBN 1-57870-274-7). This book covers a wide range of Linux cluster systems and only dedicates several pages to the HPC area.

Several new books have appeared in the last year. First is a book called "Building Clustered Linux Systems" by Robert W. Lucke which is a very good overview of cluster computing methods and hardware. The book provides a rather wide coverage of options, but does not dive too deep into any one approach. It is somewhat Hewlett Packard focused as author works for HP. (ISBN: 0-13-144853-66, 648 Pages). The second book is called "The Linux Enterprise Cluster" by Karl Kopper. This book focuses on the enterprise cluster (not HPC) and covers failover, heartbeat, load balancing, reliable printing/web server, and how to build a job scheduling system. Good coverage and examples. ( ISBN: 0-13-144853-65, 464 pages) The final new book is called "High Performance Linux Clusters with OSCAR, Rocks, OpenMosix, and MPI" by Joseph D. Sloan. It is O'Reilly's second attempt at a Linux cluster book. Many feel this second attempt has missed the mark again. (ISBN: 0-596-00570-92, 367 pages)