Re: [LUG] Clusters

[Giles Coochey <giles@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/07/2019 07:14, Rich wrote:

Hi All

I hope you are all well and enjoying the sun.

I am trying to understand clusters and why you would run one and wanted to ask some basic questions. I am tempted to build a cluster from some Raspberry Pi's to try to understand what they do in terms of power etc. For instance, if I asked one Raspberry Pi to do some browsing it would be fine. What if I asked a cluster to do some browsing, would it open the websites quicker? Or whilst on one Pi I would find it hard to do video editing, could I do video editing on 4 Pis?

Clusters are more about resilience. i.e. a member of a cluster could die, yet the load could still be shared across other members of the cluster. You can share the load and get more overall performance by adding cluster members, but if your task cannot be broken down into multiple distinct and independent sub-tasks then you will not see any performance increase for a task such as browsing.

Tasks such as Video transcoding, bitcoin mining and such are examples of tasks that can be broken into different independent subtasks and are good candidates for running on a cluster. Tasks such as web browsing are not, although if you have 100 users wanting to web-browse, then you could achieve that on a cluster of systems to provide resilience and load-balancing.

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