:Cluster Monkey: Life, The Universe, and Your Cluster - A Study in Cluster Optimization
Cluster Monkey: Life, The Universe, and Your Cluster - A Study in Cluster Optimization May 9, 2006, 07 :00 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (6067 reads) (Other stories by Doug Eadline and Jeff Layton)
"Cluster computing is great, so they say. Cobble together a few thousand servers and some Ethernet, grab some freely available software and you can now calculate the meaning of Life the Universe and Everything. Well, OK, that has been done, for those of you that have not read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the answer is there. It only took seven and half million years for the Deep Thought computer to determine this important answer. On to the next problem. Well, maybe, what if someone managed to optimize Deep Thought by 20%, then the question could be answered in a mere six million years saving those anxious to know the answer to the ultimate question quite a lot of waiting. What about your cluster? How much more performance could you be getting out of your system?
"Rest assured, we will not be tackling such large problems, however, the right cluster optimizations can make things go much faster. In our quest, we have found that optimization is more like a strategy than flipping a switch. Let's start where all journeys start--getting money..."
