Creating low-cost "learning clusters" for HPC
Get Schooled
Starting out in the HPC world requires learning to write parallel applications and learning to administer and manage clusters. We take a look at some ways to get started.
On the Beowulf mailing list [1] recently, Jim Lux started a discussion about "learning clusters" [2] – that is, low-cost units that can be used to learn about clusters. People often wonder how to get started with clusters, usually in one of two ways: "I want to learn parallel programming" or "I want to learn how to build and administer clusters." Sometimes the question is simple curiosity: "What is a Beowulf cluster and how can I build one?"
In the past, you had just a few options, including getting access to a cluster at a nearby university, buying/borrowing/using some old hardware from various sources to build one yourself, or designing your own cluster by shopping for parts. However, with the rise of virtualization, you now have more system options than ever, particularly if your budget is limited.
In this article, I'll take a quick look at various system options for people who want to learn about clusters, focusing on the programming and administration aspects. These options range in price, learning curve, ease of use, complexity, and just plain fun, but the focus is to keep the cost down while you are learning. The one aspect of clusters that I'm not really going to focus on is performance. The goal is to learn, not to find the best price per 109 floating point operations per second ($/GFLOPS) or the fastest performance. Performance can come later, once you have learned the fundamentals.
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