I recently migrated from a gorgeous 160 processor Big Blue SP2 to
a 64 node (4x500Mhz pentiums/node) AC3 Velocity NT cluster. (See
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/UserDoc/SP/what.is.sp2.html ; I hope it is
accessible outside Cornell).
The reason? We did not have funding to upgrade the SP2, and the NT
cluster was
sort of a gift. The switch in the NT cluster is supposed to be several
times
faster than that in the SP2, which is 150MB/s (it is also 6 years
newer).
Quite frankly, I don't see a performance improvement of that magnitude
as a user.
And I am not happy with the scheduler and the development environment
(understatement). But everything is under development, so perhaps
things
will improve soon.
As an aside, installation of the cluster took 15 hours for a 7 person
team,
while the SP2 took weeks ...
other links if you are interested...
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/er/media/1999/cluster.html
"Zane H. Healy" wrote:
> I'm curious, what clustering software is available that will match or exceed
> OpenVMS? Under Linux you've got Beowulf, but that's basically a distributed
> processing system IIRC. Under NT they like to claim they can cluster, but
> the NT Admins I've spoken with about it admit it's basically failover, and
> it can't even do that well.
>
> Zane
--
Carlos Murillo-Sanchez email: cem14_at_cornell.edu
428 Phillips Hall, Electrical Engineering Department
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 11:18:07 BST