Hello OSCAR users

This not a technical question, but an opinion and advice request to our 
fellows in the field.

We've had a very rewarding experience with OSCAR so far and have had about 
2 and a half years in building, maintaining, securing, and of course using 
our cluster. We have noticed that here in South Africa, many groups of 
scientists, large and small, are realizing that compute clusters could 
help their science a lot, but there is very little communication of common 
experience or "best-methods" in the community. Many groups seem to be 
overwhelmed by the amount of "hype" products and varied approaches to 
computing and are either too bewildered or "ignorant" (in the nicest 
sense of the word) to know where to start. To remedy the situation, we are 
thinking of running a short 3-4 day workshop here in Cape Town in order to 
share information and create awareness within the SA cluster community. 
The goals of this workshop are 
1) to jump start the high performance computing community within SA
2) to create forums for communication within that community
3) to create awareness of applications and solutions within HPC
4) to stimulate student interest, development and activity in the field of 
high performance computing for physics applications. 

My questions to the OSCAR community are
1) What did you wish you knew when you started out building your cluster ?
2) What hardware / software configuration do you use and why ? We're 
interested in discussing everything from chipset to network card to OS...
3) Did you worry about securing your system and if so
  a) again, what do you wish you knew then that you knew now ?
  b) If you were compromised, would you share your experience with us ?
4) What do you see as "the next big thing" in clusters and high 
performance computing in general ?
5) If you were to teach someone the basics of building a cluster, where 
would you start ?

Thanks 
bruce and mark

--
Bruce Becker
UCT-CERN Research Center - University of Cape Town
Room 405, R.W. James Building, University Avenue North
Private Bag RONDEBOSCH 7700
tel :(w) +27 21 650 3356 | (m) +27 82 537 9425 | (f) +27 21 650 3342
WEB :http://hep.phy.uct.ac.za/~becker   |       AIM : brucellino
"Viel hilft viel"





-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on
Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now,
one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology
Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com
_______________________________________________
Oscar-users mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users

Reply via email to