Performance Evaluation of SLIM and DRBL Diskless PC Clusters on Fedora Core 3

In this paper, we introduce our experiments on SLIM and DRBL diskless PC clusters. We constructed them by using 16 machines and only one disk. We run the matrix multiplication and bioinformatics software to evaluate their performance. We find that the performance of SLIM has a great improvement, and the system setup time is much less than before. The network loading of DRBL is also very high. The system boot-up time is no difference between these two systems. The best way to construct the diskless Linux cluster is to eliminate the image size. It can make the nodes have more memory space to handle the program and ease the network loading.