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By Gary Stiehr, July 3, 2008 1:20 am

HPCwire’s article Gravity Attracts a GigE HPC Cluster describes some of the features of the new ATLAS cluster at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. The 144 10-GigE port non-blocking switch from Woven was a technical feature that stood out. Additionally, it would be interesting to find out what file system is being used on the 42 storage nodes.

Also, the article mentions “An additional 500 GB of direct-connected storage is provided on each compute node. The CPU on any server can access the local disk storage on any other server as well as the central storage nodes.” I wonder in what way that local disk space is made available to the other servers.

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By Gary Stiehr, July 2, 2008 10:40 pm

Have you noticed a sprawl of MySQL database installations across your servers? I’ve seen this at various organizations. Usually it is because some tool or another utilizes it, such as a ticketing system or a content management system.

While discussing server upgrades/consolidation recently, it was mentioned that perhaps we could consolidate all of these scattered OLTP-like instances into one MySQL Cluster. Some of the benefits mentioned during the discussion were reducing effort related to configuration tracking and tuning, simplifying database backups and overall higher availability. On the other hand, sometimes clustering setup and ongoing operation can add complexity to the environment, which may offset the benefits.

How have you approached MySQL database sprawl? What has your experience been with MySQL clustering?