[Bioclusters] query

[Tim Cutts]

On 8 Dec 2005, at 6:14 am, protim chakraborti wrote:

> I have a question, is it possible to set up cluster among machines  
> having different operating systems? For instance if my master is  
> Linux and the other slave machines are in windows or others, is it  
> possible to set up a cluster?

It depends on the applications you want to run, and what you mean by  
'cluster'

Most batch queueing systems allow you to have different OS's in the  
same queueing system - we have four architectures in our largest LSF  
cluster (Tru64/Alpha, i386 Linux, x86_64 Linux, IA64 Linux).

But you should be aware that every time you add an architecture, you  
are adding complexity for the users (they need to specify which  
architecture their job requires) and it's also more work for you if  
you're having to maintain a common set of applications on all the  
architectures.

Mixing different UNIX variants is reasonably easy.  Mixed Windows/ 
UNIX clusters is almost certainly much more tricky.  LSF does support  
such mixed clusters, but I've no experience of building or running them.

Tim

-- 
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5  860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233

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