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Cluster Design
From Cluster Documentation Project
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.
