Re: [Ltsp-discuss] full-fledged diskless workstation...how

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:28:30 -0700

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 
On Friday 14 July 2006 23:06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:
  
H. Sami Sozuer wrote:
      
Hi folks,

We have a 20-node cluster that we want to use both as diskless
workstations
that connect to a dual Xeon machine as X terminals and as nodes of
our cluster
that can run MPI programs. We've installed the ltsp
server on a FC5 and tried out a client and there is no problem, the
client
        

[snip]

  
MPI stands for Message Passing Interface and it's the most popular way
of running
parallel programs on many machines. So MPI itself is not a program but a
means for
programs running on many nodes of a cluster to communicate and work on a
single job.
What we have is a student computer lab that gets used for about 10 hours
a week, and in terms
of CPU usage, the yearly average would probably be less than 0.1 per
cent! Imagine all those

CPUs just sitting idly for nearly their entire lifetime.
So what we thought would be smart was to have each machine connect to a
server, LTSP style,
and use the CPU resources of the server, while we wanted to run number
crunching applications
on the CPUs of each individual node (3GHz P4 Prescott). The server alone
    

[snip]

The idea is cute. 
Those CPUs are NOT idle, they are BUSY. You can clearly tell a 100MHz vs 
500MHz thin client.
My heretical view is 'don't try to prove how clever you are' make your thin 
clients robust and reliable. They just work. Now play with your server farm.
1st RAM then MPI (amongst your server farm).
A grey system that works is a much better solution than a shiny one that is 
broken. Unless you have (say) 2G / 512M clients, trying to make babies work 
is the road to frustration.
James 


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James

We have 20 3GHz P4 Prescotts with 800MHz FSB. Here's the output of top on one
thin client:

top - 16:24:24 up 1 day, 16 min,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks:  30 total,   2 running,  28 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si,
Mem:   1027840k total,    68596k used,   959244k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    50780k cached


I'd say that's pretty idle.
OK when people use it it won't be this idle but still how busy can it get?

BTW, I managed to get two of the nodes boot mpd and even ran my first MPI
program on the two thin diskless clients while someone was logged in to the server
on the clients. I wasn't able to detect any obvious problem on either the thin client
side or the MPI side.

The thing I'm trying to do is in a way turning the LTSP philosophy on its head.
LTSP is designed to salvage "outdated" hardware that , otherwise would most likely
be wasted. By contrast, I have hardware that is "overqualified" for a student computer
lab, and I'm trying to salvage the idle CPU cycles.

One problem though: We have two NICs on each node: a RTL8139 (100 Mbit) with a boot
ROM and  a RTL8169 (GigE). We boot off the RTL8139 of course but when the kernel boots,
it recognizes  the RTL8169 as eth0. I want to configure RTL8139 as eth0 and RTL8139 as eth1
but so far failed to do so.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Sami


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