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walden, to linux in Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster?

I’m not familiar with the concept. Would Folding@Home be considered a Beowulf Cluster?

Kangie, (edited )

No, that would be distributed computing. A Beowulf cluster is reasonably specific. Source: I work with them daily.

plenipotentprotogod,

This actually came up in my research. Folding@Home is considered a “grid computer” According to Wikipedia:

Grid computing is distinguished from … cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed (thus not physically coupled) than cluster computers.

The primary performance disadvantage is that the various processors and local storage areas do not have high-speed connections. This arrangement is thus well-suited to applications in which multiple parallel computations can take place independently, without the need to communicate intermediate results between processors.

knfrmity, to linux in Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster?

I tried migrating my personal services to Docker Swarm a while back. I have a Raspberry Pi as a 24/7 machine but some services could use a bit more power so I thought I’d try Swarm. The idea being that additional machines which are on sometimes could pick up some of the load.

Two weeks later I gave up and rolled everything back to running specific services or instances on specific machines. Making sure the right data is available on all machines all the time, plus the networking between dependencies and in some cases specifying which service should prefer which machine was far too complex and messy.

That said, if you want to learn Docker Swarm or Kubernetes and distributed filesystems, I can’t think of a better way.

stevecrox,

Docker swarm was an idea worse than kubernetes, that came out after kubernetes, that isn't really supported by anyone.

Kubernetes has the concept of a storage layer, you create a volume and can then mount the volume into the docker image. The volume is then accessible to the docker image regardless of where it is running.

There is also a difference between a volume for a deployment and a statefulset, since one is supposed to hold the application state and one is supposed to be transient.

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