Rocks Clusters, distributed computing, linux.

[Horizon88]

Hey.

Apologies for the rambling title, but I just wanted to talk with you guys, kick some ideas on this around... anyone have any experience setting up/working with clusters?

I'm looking to set up three or four machines in a cluster, for distributed computing, and I'm trying to find the best way to do it. I want them to run Linux, and I want it to take a task on one server and spread it across all the nodes. I've looked into OpenMosix and Kerrighed, as well as the Rocks Clusters project. I'm leaning towards the rocks clusters project at the moment, any opinions?

[MarkR]

It really depends what sort of cluster you want. "Cluster" is a very general term. As far as I'm aware, these projects are intended for scientific computing, not web server clusters.

Web server/application clusters are typically not "single system image", instead using a number of machines to appear as a single machine to clients, not the application side.

Such systems typically use a common database, possible utilising database replication or clustering technology.

These things are nontrivial.

Mark

[Horizon88]

It's going to be for data processing, not for web hosting or anything like that. Something where I run a task on one node and it gets broken up and tasked out to each of the nodes equally, depending on load.