FreeBSD clustering

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 16:15:11 -0500
> From: Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com>
> 
> In the last episode (Apr 15), Kevin Oberman said:
> > > > Is there any FreeBSD support for clustering? I know several
> > > > companies make cluster controllers for Linux systems, but I have
> > > > no idea if anyone has looked into whether these could be used
> > > > with FreeBSD.
> > > 
> > > What exactly do you mean by "clustering"?
> > > 
> > > There are different resource available, depening on what network
> > > service you need to cluster.  mod_backhand for Apache allows
> > > multiple web servers to act as one (for example)
> > > 
> > > Last I looked, everything that I found available for Linux was also
> > > available for FreeBSD, but it's been a little while since I've
> > > explored the concept of "processing farms".
> > > 
> > > If you state what you're trying to accomplish, it will give folks a
> > > better idea of how to answer.
> > 
> > We are looking at cluster as a high availability compute box for
> > statistical analysis. Our stats guy thinks having a cluster that he
> > can send different bits of the data analysis would be an excellent
> > solution as his operations are quite atomic.
> 
> Take a look at ports/net/mpich or net/pvm, which are libraries that let
> you coordinate programs running on different machines.  They're mainly
> meant for parallel computing as opposed to fault tolerant clusters
> though.
>  
> > My boss has also suggested that is might be suitable for our DNS
> > servers as they need to be very high availability, but this would be
> > of secondary importance.
> 
> DNS is already "clustered"; just set up multiple slave servers.

Thanks, Dan. But I guess what I am looking for is MOSIX-like capability
to move processes between systems to balance the load. As far as I know
nothing like this is available for FreeBSD. I was hoping someone else
knew better, a distinct possibility since I'm a routing guy and my
knowledge of this stuff is limited. (I hope this explains my poor
explanation of what I was looking for.)

As far as I can tell, doing anything like this would require kernel mods,
one reason I thought it a bit unlikely.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634