Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters

Linux Enterprise Cluster: Build a Highly Available Cluster with Commodity Hardware and Free Software

Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux, Second Edition (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

Applications

Building Linux Clusters

Format: Paperback
Author: David HM Spector
ReleaseDate: July, 2000
Publisher: O'Reilly
Rating:

The Author Responds
When the book was ready to be put into O'Reilly's publishing system the then-editor of this series left to pursue a career at VALinux; the copy of the book put into the system is missing was over 2 months old and missing 50-100 pages of changes/additions/updates and other corrections that are not reflected in the printed book. While I can sympathize with some readers who may have been expecting a different book that covered the topic of cluster building in a different way, I would like to respond with several facts to clarify issues surrounding "Building Linux Clusters":

1) The book, as published, is not the final draft given to the editors at O'Reilly. This was discovered by me only when the book was delivered to stores -- at which time (obviously) it was too late to do anything about it.

2) Despite the issues surrounding which version of the book went into production, the book sold over 10,000 copies out of a printing of 12,000: O'Reilly decided not to issue a 2nd edition for a number of reasons, including the fact that many of the facilities I documented in the book (such as MPI, PVM and tools for cluster management, parallel rendering, etc. ) were subsequently available pre-installed in many major Linux distributions which obviated the need for a dedicated book on cluster building.

3) Many, many readers have had great success with the book and have written to tell me so, including several readers who were able to build 100+ node clusters in a matters of a few hours using the software provided with the book.

4) A large number of software-related problems experienced by readers came about as readers attempted to build new distributions (RedHat7, RedHat8, etc. ) based on the original software (based on RedHat6. 2) provided with the book. Where possible I proved many hundred of hours of assistance to such readers.

5) Updated software and other tools were made available both at O'Reilly's web site as well as my own to help readers who found that certain tools would not work on their configurations and have been downloaded and successfully used thousands of times.

Good cluster overview - bad installation instructions
Didn't anyone try to build a cluster using this text before it went to print? I'll keep looking for another book on clustering. This book describes a good overview of what a cluster is and how it operates, but the installation instructions were horrible, directories on CDROM were different than stated in the text, files were located in the wrong directories, kernel had to be modified to use network card, etc.

Amazing learning experience
I am at working building a super computer now. Most of the O'Reilly books I have looked at don't read as well as this one does. While the author is involved in stock market work I don't find him condesending or snobby or like he doesn't have time for me. He tells the straight story of how to build a super computer with all the practical details you could want. I read it from the school library first and thought I wouldn't buy it myself but I have and now am really enjoying reading it. I am learning all kinds of things in the process.