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rcrijkse
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Server farms and load balancing

Mon Apr 29, 2002 3:30 pm

I am wondering if you can do this at home. Don't know all the specifics of server farms but im guesstimating that its pretty much like a extremely large domain of servers with the PDC?? controlling which functions of what ever workload they have.

To make it easier to understand.....I have a whole bunch of older pc's laying around. I want to network all of them and have one main machine be in controll of all other pc's down to the processes that each cpu on each machine does.

Is this possible?

I just joined a Folding@home team and have some serious crunching to do to get into the top 200 on my team. i don't want to use ics or anything like that. my whole point is to see if i can build a server farm or load balancing type of set up. anyone know of any white papers talking about load balancing how-to's or server farm how-to's?
 
PRIME1
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Mon Apr 29, 2002 10:31 pm

You may want to load the Linux OS and give a try at a cluster. The most popular available for Linux is <a href="http://www.scyld.com/">Beowulf</a> which would allow you to link all of those computers together through a network and create a large scale number cruncher. <i>I have never worked on a task like this and it would take a bit of work to get running.</I>
 
murray
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Tue Apr 30, 2002 1:33 am

And just why aren't you folding for Tech-Report? <the look>
 
resedit
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Tue Apr 30, 2002 5:28 am

I have built beowulf clusters before.

There's no point in building a beowulf for folding- folding is not properly threaded for smp let alone for beowulf.

I would recommend putting linux on them, though.
Make one a NAT server- a gateway to the rest.

Then set the others up to run folding from the crontab and just let them run.

wget http://macaddict4life.dhs.org/install_folding.sh
sh install_folding.sh

That will install the folding@home client on x86 linux, utililizing your crontab.

To manually stop it- just touch /tmp/stopfold
To start it again- rm /tmp/stopfold

Once its running- just leave it alone.
The only thing you *might* want to do if you are super tight on hd space is to modify /etc/syslog.conf to no longer log cron job calls.

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