Designing a Cluster for Your Application

The cluster design rules (CDR) helps inexperienced users focus on the most important factors in cluster design. Without it, users must rely on a "cookie cutter" approach that can result in giving up performance unnecessarily. To really determine which cluster design will be best for a particular application, the designer must know what the application does and which hardware architecture will best support the application program, given a set of constraints on budget, space, power, and cooling. Accordingly, we've built the CDR, an expert system with a Web front end that's designed to help users build cluster systems suited to their own application codes and available resources.