I recently ran into the idea of building a small beowulf cluster in my home. After some googling and after reading some articles from blogs, I was in a position to create my own beowulf cluster. I clustered my Desktop(Intel Dual Core – 1.6 GHz) and my Laptop(Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz). I spent almost 15 hours figuring how to make my desktop and laptop communicate. After three or four futile attempts, I made these two machines talk to each other and execute programs on them parallelly :D. I’m using MPICH-1 to run parallel programs on both the machines. Both the machines run Ubuntu operating system but the cluster can be configured easily on any other distribution very easily.
I’ve written a HowTo here –
I ran a program to calculate the value of PI and find the error of PI from the actual value. The follow are its summary.
Performance Statistics:
———*Run 1: Laptop alone* ———-
pi is approximately 3.1415926535898224, Error is 0.0000000000000293
wall clock time = 3.753598
——-*Run 2: Laptop + Desktop but with only 1 core enabled in my Desktop*——
pi is approximately 3.1415926535898047, Error is 0.0000000000000115
wall clock time = 2.172729
——-*Run 3: Laptop + Two Cores in Desktop* —-
pi is approximately 3.1415926535898047, Error is 0.0000000000000115
wall clock time = 2.167609
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