Fred Scott Thompson

A long time ago I wrote an article meant to be published in SysAdmin but that never happened. I published it on the web and got some interest when it was listed by Deadly.org. It was even commented on in Russian blogs which I had translated for me at work. I took my servers down a while ago but decided to put the article back up here at http://fredscottthompson.com/webcluster . The material is dated, some of the links are broken but it is still interesting what can be done with discarded hardware a little ingenuity.

Ever have a batch process which takes too long? A daily job that runs 25 hours? An overnight task that takes 12 hours? Something the users want sooner?

My favorite solution is to use wireless and host on a planet with a slower rotation rate but there are problems with that approach starting with lack of rack space .

The traditional solution is Beowulf.

• You say you have no Beowulf cluster for parallel processing? Your desktop support people will not let you build one out of spares?
  
  
• You are doing ETL using business languges not supported by parallel processing libraries such as MPICH and MPI?

Read on - there is another way!