Cluster Design

Clusters are all about design. Indeed, clusters are about designing machines around problems. When designing a cluster the following questions need to be may be helpful

Consider your budget?

• Do you need help with software and support? If so, reserve soem funds for this part of the project.
• Do you plan on assembling the cluster yourself? If yes, at what level? Starting from motherboards, cases, memory, processros, etc. can be very tiem consumeing. Buy quality parts

How many processors?

• This depends on your application. How well does you applicaiton scale. Have you tested it on a real cluster? If it is a common application, have other run it on a cluster?

What Type of Interconnect?

• Again, this depends on your applicaiton. If you can use Gigabit Ethernet, then you can probabaly by more nodes. If you need a faster interconnect, then you may have to sacrifie nodes for interconnects to stay in your budget.

Books

• Engineering a Beowulf-Style Compute Cluster by Robert G. Brown - A freely available book on building/designing Beowulf style clusters.