Can GNU/Linux machines be clustered?
• (REG) Different people mean different things when they talk about clustering. Some people want transparent fault tolerance and load balancing of general applications, others want parallel processing of a single job. Most people who talk about fault tolerance expect hardware and OS support of this (if a node goes down, the OS will automatically migrate the application to another node). This is not (yet) available for Linux. You can write a fault tolerant application for a network of computers without direct OS support: you just need to structure your application appropriately. Note that a fault tolerant distributed application may also be a parallel, multithreaded application. The Beowulf project provides an API and system management software to write parallel distributed applications on a network of Linux machines. The main emphasis here is on parallelism to get maximum processing power, although fault tolerance is possible too. An example of a Beowulf clustered Linux system is Avalo
