I first heard this term the other day, but it was in the context of “nobody does this anymore”. I looked it up and it sounds cool… is there any reason I shouldn’t consider it in 2025?
These days people usually just call it a “cluster” w/o reference to the Beowulf system from the 90s.
The amount of compute you can fit in a single box w/o having to deal with distributed systems BS is kind of insane now though. You probably don’t need a cluster to do a lot of things you would’ve needed one for in the past – a single computer is often already good enough and way simpler to manage…
I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.
Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823
I mean you could, but kubernet/containers really help it not be needed, as you can just run on any hardware and it doesnt have to be the same stuff on all the systems.
I first heard this term the other day, but it was in the context of “nobody does this anymore”. I looked it up and it sounds cool… is there any reason I shouldn’t consider it in 2025?
These days people usually just call it a “cluster” w/o reference to the Beowulf system from the 90s.
The amount of compute you can fit in a single box w/o having to deal with distributed systems BS is kind of insane now though. You probably don’t need a cluster to do a lot of things you would’ve needed one for in the past – a single computer is often already good enough and way simpler to manage…
I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.
Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823
I mean you could, but kubernet/containers really help it not be needed, as you can just run on any hardware and it doesnt have to be the same stuff on all the systems.