Linux Journal: Book Review: Building Linux Clusters

"The material covered in the first four chapters is well written and designed to ease newbies into the waters. Topics covered include: the history of parallel computing, concepts of networks and parallelism, parallel programming systems and libraries, cluster types, cluster design, construction and assembly considerations, and hardware. Expectant cluster builders, like myself, will be familiar with most of the introductory material but may glean some useful bits on advanced topics such as meshes, hypercubes and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). The author's recommendations for entry-level, mid-level and advanced-level cluster configurations will seem unrealistic to most Linux users. I felt that the hardware I had assembled for my cluster was pretty extravagant for a hobbyist to be experimenting with. However, my hardware didn't measure up to the seven 450MHz Pentium processors suggested for the entry-level cluster."

"I'm dumbfounded at how this work made it out of any publishing house, let alone O'Reilly's. To avoid this kind of debacle in the future, let me go on the record as stating that I will personally review any upcoming revisions/editions of Building Linux Clusters and test the software within, for free."

"Building Linux Clusters should be considered a beta release. Much work needs to be done on the next version before I will be able to recommend it to anyone. Technically, I am ahead of where I was with my cluster before I got the book. But it sure doesn't feel like it."

Complete Story

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