G'day all Anyone out there involved with, or has theoretical experience with HPC using clusters? Before I approach the various projects and make myself look a complete twonk, I'd appreciate some views and thoughts. Please?
Been looking at Rocks Clusters (http://www.rockclusters.org) which provides the HPC platform based on REL 4, and the Linux Terminal Server project. The reason is a theoretical one of utilising redundant computing power, ie old out of spec machines that are to be chucked, in an environmentally nice way. So the solution I came up with was to run the computing nodes as diskless work stations, getting their kernal / apps from the LTSP server, and dealing with the cluster server for the work queue. This sounds pretty straight forward to me. However, all references I find to cluster computing shows that the computing nodes each are headless systems; which is fine but I wanted to look at reducing the green footprint by taking the heavy power requirements out of the equation, ie the HDDs etc. I have already identified some technical aspects that knock this on the head - the main one being I envisage two seperate ethernet networks, one for LTSP and the other for the cluster, but neither software supports more than one NIC on a terminal / computing node. The next problem is that of storage space on the diskless terminal. By utilising the LTSP server as the processor rather spoils the whole thing, so I've looked at the terminal running the kernal and any apps locally, using the LTSP server to host the files required by the kernal / apps to run. This will reduce the load on the LTSP network. However, the terminal will still require to store stuff temporarily, like the swap partition, so I thought about using either flash drives, too expensive, or USB pen drives, preferred. I chose Rocks over other projects mainly due to it's pedigree and support infrastructure, and LTSP as it seems to work with practically everything. "But why?" I hopefully hear you groan. As I say it's all theoretical, but doing some research there is certainly need for this type of setup. Maybe not for a top level production system, but one that just plods along and does the job. Sorry, I know it's not exactly Ubuntu orientated .... but this area really interests me. E -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
