Building a home cluster - hardware and cost analysis [closed]

Building a home cluster - hardware and cost analysis [closed]

Does anyone know some links / books / anything you can think of, that describe the process of building a little home cluster (when I say home, it doesn't necessarily mean for keeping at home - just means it's relatively cheap and small) for experimental purposes, with a special emphasis on what hardware would be adequate today, and some kind of cost analysis ?

Asked by: Guest | Views: 292

Total answers/comments: 3

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Guest [Entry]

"Check out the books Beowulf Cluster Computing by Thomas Sterling (one for Linux & one for Windows). They tell you all you need to know about using MPI to get your nodes to talk to one another.

A friend & I built a cluster of 8 boxes using some really crappy hardware and ran Windows XP on them. These were like Pentium I - 90 MHz boxes. Well below the specs required for Windows, but it ran fine. We also ran SQL Server 2000 on them (also well below the recommended specs) and did some black-scholes modeling of stock option pricing on them.

It's difficult to recommend what kind of hardware would be adequate without knowing what you want to do with your cluster. But the bottom line is that you can build a cluster of most anything."

Guest [Entry]

"I'd start by looking at the LittleFE (http://littlefe.net/) or Bootable Cluster CD (http://bccd.net/) projects, personally. Also see the Ubuntu Cloud project (http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud).

More-or-less any hardware should work. I'd be inclined to look at some form of close-out deal or machines coming off lease to pick-up some cheap hardware."

Guest [Entry]

Have a look at Rocks which is a cluster distribution which makes building cluster realy easy. It also scales up to at least a few houndred nodes.