From: Bo-sung Lee Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm Subject: Re: newbie question: beowulf&smp Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 17:16:25 +0900 Organization: Dept. of Aerospace Eng. Seoul National Univ. Message-Id: <35ECFED9.3F6E@pvmcube4.snu.ac.kr> References: Reply-To: bslee@pvmcube4.snu.ac.kr Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Christian Stoecker wrote: > > Hi all. > > For a project of about $35k-$50k I have some questions, which I suppose > are trivial, but I could not find appropriate answers ... > > The goal is to build a beowulf style machine to do numerical calculations > (floating-point) which can be parallellized. > > 0) PVM is a subset of beowulf software, right? From what I have read, I > suspect that PVM is easier to handle than MPI and that using PVM with XPVM > on Linux should be all we need? Are linked LInux boxes running pvm a > beowulf computer? No, PVM isn't subset of beowulf software. In Beowulf project, some uses pvm and others use mpi. Beowulf projects are, I know, making supercomputer using much number of low performance PC's or workstations. In this project, developers modified pvm source and mpi source code for getting good communication efficiency. PVM is massage passing library for hetrogeneous networked workstations. Beowulf project uses networked workstations for supercomputing performance. In LAM mpi, xmpi like xpvm is provided. If you want to use heterogeneous system, MPI is almost impossible.... > > 1) Does it make sense to use dual-pentium boards for the nodes? (We want > to stay x86-based.) Or would more nodes with single processor boards have > more advantages? > I propose single processor machines. Because if you use SMP machines which have small number of processors, the comunication speed on interprocessor and intra-processors are very different. So, speed-up and scaliability is poor. > 2) Programming pvm does not require threads, but programming smp nodes > does? > I don't know about threads... sorry.. > 3) Its easier to incorporate some old suns in the cluster if we go with > pvm rather than mpi? > YESSSS... You can use old suns as front-end machines, on which xpvm-this requires much system resources-may be running, or you can use this systems as accounting machines etc. > Thanks for your time, > Not at all. > Chris > > Visit follow links http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/beowulf/beowulf.html : Beowulf http://www.osc.edu/lam.html : LAM-MPI http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html : PVM http://www.genias.de/genias_welcome.html : CODINE For more links, visit my home pages, I link more. http://www.bslee.home.ml.org ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sorry for my poor English :) Bo-sung Lee ETRI/Super Computer Center, Korea e-mail : bslee@pvmcube4.snu.ac.kr bslee@linuxsvr.seri.re.kr ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++