“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.”