Re: I'll ask again, Linux Clusters

["Adam C. Powell, IV" <adam powell nist gov>]

"Frank C. Brants" wrote:

> At 01:57 PM 1/28/99 , you wrote:
>
> There was an aritlce in a recent Linux Journal about a rather large (100 +
> machines) Alpha Linux Cluster created by a movie house in California to do
> the image processing for the "Titanic" movie, but I can't lay my fingers on
> it... anybody?
>
> I think I followed links from RedHat's web site, but it appears to be hung
> at the moment.
>
> But, I specifically remember it was an Alpha Linux Cluster, running 4.2
> (which may have been the current release when the cluster was built.)
>
> Hope this helps.

Sure, but that cluster had a very different purpose.  Balancing load for their
large computations and balancing load for a web server are very different kinds
of problems.

By the way, most of the benchmarking posts I've seen on this list are hardware
comparisons for computations.  How does Linx/Alpha compare to Linux/Intel for
web service?  What's the relative importance of memory size, SCSI/IDE, chip
clock speed, LX vs. SX and off-chip cache, etc. for a reasonably large server
(i.e. frequent access to pages taking far more space than RAM cache)?  Has
anyone seen comparisons for Linux/Alpha vs. NT/Alpha or DU/Alpha?  Just curious-
but it may be important to Aaron (among others).

Zeen,

-Adam `Cold Fusion' Powell, IV http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~powell/ ____
USDoC, National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)  |\ ||<  |
Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science  | \||_> |