On Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:39:19 -0500 Predrag Punosevac <punoseva...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All, > > Could anybody kindly point me to any literature regarding > building a high-performance computing cluster using OpenBSD. I am not > interested in FreeBSD and NetBSD related papers on this topics. I can > find them easily. I am specifically interested in OpenBSD. > Applications I am planning to run are related to Bifurcation Theory. > > Thank You, > Predrag Punosevac Pendrag, At one point in time, the phrase "High Performance Computing" (HPC) actually meant something fairly specific, but over the years it has degraded to an exceedingly vague buzzword. In the classic sense of HPC where you're doing significant amounts of computation on problems requiring tightly coupled nodes (i.e. hard parallelization), asking for OpenBSD specific papers on this topic is the equivalent of asking for papers on using a hammer to trun a screw. In the case of using classic HPC on hard parallelization problems, OpenBSD is the wrong tool for the job. The reason is OpenBSD does not support vast amounts of RAM, and it doesn't have support for fast memory interconnects (Myrinet, SCI, ...). If the problems you're trying to solve do not have intensive memory requirements and qualify as easy parallelization (a.k.a. "Embarrassingly Parallel"), then you do not need a tightly coupled cluster and OpenBSD could be a good choice. In essence, it comes down to the specific problem(s) *YOU* are trying to solve, so you *REALLY* need to elaborate on your problem domain(s) and how you are trying to solve them. Off the top of my head, one of the best people on this list to ask would be Todd Fries since he works on LAM/MPI (OpenMPI). And yes, though I doubt Poul-Henning Kamp found it humorous, the very first cluster I built was really named "PHK" :-) -jcr
