From: "Alain Coetmeur" Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi Subject: Re: newbie question Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 12:23:50 +0100 Organization: Informatique-CDC Message-Id: <74lmri$46l3@puligny.idt.cdc.fr> References: <366dda10.0@news.cyberway.com.sg> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit CHAN a écrit dans le message <366dda10.0@news.cyberway.com.sg>... >Hi > >I'm confused between Beowulf and MPI, what is the difference between them? MPI is a standard defining an Application Programming Interface for message passing, and oriented toward High Performance Computing like scientific computing. Beowulf is a HPC parallel cluster environment made upon Linux, including an MPI implementation. maybe is there a load balancing/load scheduling software included, to build a kind of Computing center (like super computers) from a cluster of PC. Beowul was initiated by NASA research... > >If I have 4 pcs running MPI, can I run some application (e.g. Apache)on them >for load-balancing and fall-over? the type of clustering you request, is the "high availability" clustering. this is not the goal of MPI, yet maybe if you are smart you can use it for load-balacing. for fall-over, MPI 1.1 is designed for static processor list and it is only in MPI2 that dynamic process creation is supported. few implementation support this anyway. PVM (an older Message Passing API) does support this better, but anyway PVM, like MPI is designed for high performance computing, not high availability networking. you can always use a sportcar as a taxi... maybe not the best solution anyway. >Do I have to get a version of Apache that >runs on MPI, or just the normal version will do? hum... don't know, think no.