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

Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers

Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters

Programming

Building Clustered Linux Systems (Hewlett-Packard Professional Books (Paperback))

Format: Paperback
Author: Robert W. Lucke
ReleaseDate: 21 September, 2004
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Rating:

Perfect companion book to Linux Enterprise Cluster (Karl Kopper)
It also devides the clusters into the three main types,

HPC *High performance computing,
High Throughput and
High Availability cluster

and describes their usages. The book describes in simple reproducable steps how to build a medium to medium big sized cluster. The book is describing cluster projects more from a bird view and gives a whole sight overview including budget calculations, comparing several architectures also by their technology and environmental conditions (Power usage, Cooling requirements etc. ).

The book is the perfect companion to the Linux Enterprise Cluster from Karl Kopper. While Karls book is a bit more practical it concentrates only on the technical configuration of "small" clusters.

Here is where Lubke comes in and extends that knowledge by the many environmental factors *Budget, technical considerations, Calculations, Estimates, Planning what to expect from your hardware *Performance, Weight, Heat, Flooring considerations etc.

After you read the book, you will have learned all necessary steps to build your own clusters. The "only" thing left to you is to put the ship to water ;-)

An incredible book and a real eye opener !!.

Very good book. My only complains are:
g. * a little bit too chatty (e. on page 162 he starts lecturing you about the meaning of 'freedom' after using the book's and your minds real estate telling you on page 36 about disposing of packaging hardware, . . . @@, ;-))
* still using RH for 'serious' Linux work?
* pg 172, statement about Debian not supporting AMD "as of this writing" (?!) Could have just included the sentence. "check as of your reading of the book"
* no mention of transmeta's technological hardware advances (company itself may very soon go south) but their 'ideas' are really promising (for servers with very low power comsumption)
* pg 209, problems with RAID and root filesystem and things. You could just run Debian from a Live CD and leave all writable RAID disks along.

Finally a good Linux Clustering book
You really couldn't ask for more. This book is very well organized, gets right to the point, has some dry humor (a tradition in technical books) but its not overdone (overdoing it is also a tradition). The thing I like most about this book, is the author is very direct. I have some experience with the publishing industry, and authors are *PAID BY THE PAGE*. Which gives them a tremendous incentive to dilute the material into unreadable crap. This author avoids this and deserves the highest praise for doing so.