From owner-chemistry |-at-| ccl.net Fri Mar 24 13:52:00 2006 From: "Andrew D. Fant fant-$-pobox.com" To: CCL Subject: CCL: Wireless cluster Message-Id: <-31316-060324122201-31682-JulwBGzs4E1ASkLE0T+sNw:_:server.ccl.net> X-Original-From: "Andrew D. Fant" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:21:48 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Sent to CCL by: "Andrew D. Fant" [fant=-=pobox.com] John McKelvey jmmckel%x%attglobal.net wrote: > > Please don't laugh, or maybe this is so funny [ridiculous?] that you'll > get a good laugh, and it will make your day! > > Anyway, I want to build a small linux cluster [6-8 total processors] but > don't have a lot of cooling in one place. Running wires would not be > practical, if not impossible Now, the application is extremely > coarse-grain, and only a very, very small amount of data gets moved > about once initialization of a job is done.. Can it be done "wireless?" Hey John, I wouldn't make it my first solution, but it could be done. As others have pointed out, your bandwidth would be limited, your latency would be rather variable, and you would be stuck in half-duplex mode for your communications. You might want to look at more sophisticated methods for data transmission to make up for this if the process isn't truly embarrassingly parallel. In particular, coding with MPI even if it isn't strictly required for the parallelism might pay dividends, since you would be able to use gather/scatter and broadcast/reduce code to sling what data you have around, which might be more efficient than what you can do from the shell. Alternately, if you break down and get a good wireless router that supports multicast well, you might want to look at using multicast to handle communications. Again, the idea being to announce data that other systems might care about and let the ones that actually DO care grab it from one set of packets. Then again, they are doing wonders with pantone-matched drop cables and discrete baseboard mounting clips these days, too. ;-) Hope this helps, Andy -- Andrew Fant | And when the night is cloudy | This space to let Molecular Geek | There is still a light |---------------------- fant##pobox.com | That shines on me | Disclaimer: I don't Boston, MA | Shine until tomorrow, Let it be | even speak for myself