Many businesses used to consider supercomputing beyond the reach of their budgets, but new Linux applications have made high-performance clusters more affordable than ever. This new guide covers everything a newcomer to clustering will need to plan, build, and use high-performance Linux cluster. This book focuses on clustering for high performance computation, although much information also applies to clustering for high availability (failover and disaster recovery). Then, you'll learn about software options that can save you hours - or even weeks - time distribution. Because of the various options that exist in every field of clustering software, the author discusses the pros and cons of the major free software projects and select those most likely to help the new cluster administrators and programmers. OSCAR and Rocks, two comprehensive installation and administrative systems openMosix (a convenient tool for distributing jobs), Linux kernel extensions that migrate processes transparently for load balancing PVFS, one of the parallel filesystems that make clustering I / O C3 easier, one set of commands to implement some system of ganglia, OpenPBS, and cloning tools (Kickstart, SIS and G4U) are also discussed. The book looks at cluster installation packages (OSCAR & Rocks) and then considers the core packages individually for greater depth or for people who want to perform a custom installation.