This is an interesting article on how a 300 node cluster was built, using FreeBSD. A nice bonus with the article is that it has a list of major vendor that work with FreeBSD. Elsewhere, if you ever wanted to graph your network traffic, disk usage, system load, or anything else about your network, servers or workstations, then RRDTool is your best friend and SNMP is it's very sexy spouse. Between the two you can collect data on almost element in your network, either local or remote, and graph it almost any way you want. Read the paper here.
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I'm a small scale user of FreeBSD, having it running on about half a dozen servers and a desktop, but still I'm amazed by its stability. It's good to see FreeBSD hold its own in a clustering environment bigger than just a test lab. Go FreeBSD!
From the article, this is currently running 4.8, I can not wait to see the follow up article when 5.2 or 5.3 gets implemented. I suspect that 5.3 will be in the stable branch. Hoping 5.2 is going to be in the stable branch (can only hope).
If anyone is curious; 4.9 is the current stable release. Currently 5.x is a "New Technology" release (aka bleeding edge). 5.2 is in RC1 status.
that was a very cool and interesting read! nice to see a worth os-news submition as opposed to the setting up apache/mysql submission....
interesting to read about the high hardware attrition and some of the faults of the tyan motherboard/bios.
i've heard sun fan ranting about how much better sun equipment is not because of there performance but because of their durability. well i still can't agree or disagree with them (the closest i've got to hpc is a cluster of 3 durons) i can at least now see what the issue would/could be.
These are two different articles in this headline (the clister, and snmp/rrdtool). I wrote the latter and just read the former and I'm seriously impressed. I'm wondering if I'm worthy enough to piggyback on the success of the former!
FWIW, http://guinness.cs.stevens-tech.edu/~jschauma/hpcf/">some are using http://www.netbsd.org/">NetBSD recent" rel="nofollow">http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-cluster/2003/11/06/0004.html">... posting to the <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/MailingLists/#tech-cluster">tech-cluster&l... mailing list.
I only submitted (didnt write it)the story about the FreeBSD cluster. But your story has plenty of value. Never shortchange your self and never under estimate *bsd.
FYI: Good info Anonymous about netbsd.
