Computer Cluster

Do you have heavy computation tasks?

Or do you have a bunch of workstations that work separately?

Or do you think that a computer cluster is too expensive?

You need us.

What is a computer cluster?

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A cluster is composed of a bunch of workstation nodes and a manager server. What it can do includes:

  • Perform huge computation tasks with all or some of the nodes in the cluster;
  • Automatically arrange the tasks to queue according to their priorities;
  • If some of the workstation nodes go down, others wouldn't be influenced;
  • Automatically shutdown and power-up some or all nodes according to tasks assigned.

Computer clusters used to be expensive, which makes that only large organizations can afford them. But the world of computer is fast developing. Now with only thousands of dollars, you can have a decent modern cluster. Or, if you don't have a budget of thousands of dollars for a cluster, but you already have several acceptable workstations that work separately, you can still make them into a cluster.

PFTN's Solution

PFTN provides a series of solutions for computer clusters fitting different computation requirements. Generally, the features include:

  • Economical
  • Operating System: GNU linux
  • Computational Nodes: Disk-less workstations
  • Workload Manager: SLURM
  • Power Saving: Automatically shutdown and power-up according to tasks

If you already have several workstations

If you do have them, we can help you to put them into a cluster, without harming their original operating systems and software. Thus you can put any of them out of the cluster and back into their original states.

To do this, all we need are:

  • A server (which doesn't have to be powerful) to manage all the workstation nodes, and to store data，
  • A network to connect all nodes and the server,
  • Software installed on the server to manage the tasks

Because in the cluster all workstation nodes are booted from the network and work disk-lessly, their original hard disks won't be touched (if no one intends to do that), thus all of their original operating systems and software won't be harmed. So if you need some of the workstations to be out of the cluster and do their original jobs, all you need to do is to reboot them from their own hard disks.

If you don't have the workstations

Well, you need to buy some from hardware dealers. PFTN doesn't sell computer hardware directly, but can give you suggestions according to your computation requirements.

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