Hi Vivek-
This has gone decidedly off topic...
On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 12:05:35PM -0700, Vivek Ayer wrote:
> I was going to start small given the budget I have. Eventually, I'd
> like dedicate a gigabit switch for HTTP traffic and Infiniband for
> compute traffic. At first, I don't expect too much MPI work to be
> done, but I've heard FreeBSD performing better under duress than linux
> as the number of HTTP threads increases.
[...]
> The final option would be to divide and conquer: 6 for HTTP, 6 for
> computing, but my reasoning is why not scale for HTTP as much as
> possible.
This is really the only reasonable approach. No one would run a
production web service on top of a parallel computing cluster unless
they had to. Remember that your execute nodes will run random jobs from
random users -- do you want that on a box that hosts a critical database
or webserver? The scenario is worse if you participate on a grid.
As always, use the best tool for the job. As you've noticed, OpenBSD
will do well managing your network. Frankly, in most cases it also
makes for an excellent database or webserver. As for the execute nodes,
run Linux on them unless you have some reason (user requirements,
demonstrated performance gains, etc) to do otherwise.
--
o--------------------------{ Will Maier }--------------------------o
| web:.......http://www.lfod.us/ | email.........willma...@ml1.net |
*---------------------[ BSD: Live Free or Die ]--------------------*
