- What is a Compute Cluster?
- Different Types of Compute Jobs
- Building a Compute Cluster
- Computing Resources Needed
- Price Per CPU
- Optimal Solution Economics
- Beowulf Solution
- Beowulf Cluster on SPARC Hardware
- SUN Supported Beowulf Cluster
- How To Build Your Compute Cluster
- Advantages of a Sun Based Cluster
- Grid Computing
- Conclusion
- Compute Cluster Software
Grid Computing
Building compute clusters is a standard procedure today. We are now moving from compute clusters to powerful, managed Cluster Grids and computing resources are easily available via Web interfaces. Sun's Grid Computing strategy is based on an evolutionary and extensible cluster hardware and software architecture, starting with Cluster Grids, moving to Campus Grids, and going to Global Grids. Cluster Grids usually provide compute power for a single department, a team, a project, and so forth. The key objective is to maximize resource utilization.
When several Cluster Grids from several departments are combined into one virtual computing environment, another important objective appearsresource sharing. In the Campus Grid environment several teams from different departments on the campus or enterprise, with different applications and goals and deadlines, share one larger computing resource (for example, a cluster of clusters).
To guarantee fair sharing of the resources and take into account different deadlines, urgencies, and policies for the different teams, Sun will soon release the Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise Edition software which the acts like a broker among the teams, on top of the Sun Grid Engine clusters, to provide the intelligent resource management. The source code of this resource broker is already available at:
http://www.gridengine.sunsource.net.
Combining resources beyond a campus or enterprise leads us to the Global Grids. Besides the main objectives of maximum utilization and resource sharing, a new challenge risesthe use of the open Internet for transmitting applications and data. This application requires authentication of the user (to use others' resources remotely), secure transfer of information, and handling of distributed files, among others. That is where grid technologies such as Avaki and Globus come into play. For more information, see http://www.sun.com/gridware/.