Practical Beowulf 79
elsewhere sent us
Linux gushes savings for oil giant
where you can read about the 32 node beowulf cluster being
used by an oil company to replace IBM super computers.
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score. -- Ted Turner
for the love of god, rob, stop the moderation (Score:1)
unpopular ideas are pushed down. i can't
believe you are letting this happen.
i can't believe people thought this sort of bias
wouldn't happen when moderation first started.
power corrupts. please please please please please
do something about it. it's a horribly broken kludge
and it's not working.
You can convert those RPMs (Score:1)
Impressive (Score:1)
I'll be switching (Score:1)
Two million lines of code... (Score:1)
...is what the article said. Their software *could* have been ported to NT, but the article also mentioned that "...it would take several years..." to do so.
This is the fundemental problem with Win Anything. M$ programming languages are totally non-standard. Having to port a 2E+6 line program from Unix to NT would have been *nasty*, so it's pretty easy to see why they went to Linux instead.
NT cheaper? (Score:2)
Anyway, the beauty of this is that when big companies like this start using Linux, it's easier for me to convince my boss that it's a good choice for our small company.
World domination: the sooner the better.
Re:The bad thing about Beowulf... (Score:2)
If you are serious about getting a cluster running, take a look at:
http://www.xtreme-machines.com/x-cluster-qs.html [xtreme-machines.com]
This is very up-to-date and basically begins by advising you to use your EL CD as a coaster.
Mike Prinkey
Re:for the love of god, rob, stop the moderation (Score:1)
I too have seen some articles moderated down not because they were trolls, flamebait, or not informative, but because they were unpopular.
OTOH, I have seen articles moderated WAY up (like to +5) without justification (like some of mine). Now, it looked to me that the subject just happened to strike an emphatic response with the moderator, and not be of pulitzer writing quality.
I think that if an article is moderated up as well as down, then at least one of the modertators is judging content as opposed to writing quality and subject relevence. This should be investigated since that isn't what a moderator should do.
Re:Hooray! (Score:1)
Re:Hooray! (Score:1)
Re:A stain on our community (Score:1)
Re:Passing the savings on to the consumer (Score:1)
Re:Passing the savings on to the consumer (Score:1)
Re:Math and terminology? (Score:1)
Re:Thanks for the Code! (Score:1)
2. I would like to see journaled filesystems, more drivers for various hardware devices, better monitoring utilities, better installation tools for mass installs and upgrades. We would like to see gcc integrate the P3 mmx instruction set for floating point purposes.
3. We chose RedHat really because that was what Harry Duffey and myself were most familiar with. For our programmers and users, the version of linux was irrelevant. It doesn't hurt with upper management the RedHat is probably the most visible and known Linux vendor at this time. In fact, we are in the process of taking a look at FreeBSD, Debian, and Suse just to level check RedHat. I have not relied upon RedHat for any support. The few times we called RedHat, we had a hard time getting support. I typically use Dejanews and find almost all the support i need.
4. IBM is aware of what we are doing as they had an oppurtunity to sell us Netfinity PCS for our project. IBM has real nice systems (PC and Rs6ks) and they did a good job in our evaluation. However, all the PIII 500 performed almost exactly the same in our seismic processing benchmarks. Hence, we had no good reason to switch from Dell. I think IBM is very interested in the market. We have worked for IBM for years and they are good partners and I suspect if they are smart they will have an excellent Beowulf offering. I am not sure what this will mean for the SP2 though although I suspect for the time being, many large companies will buy the SP2 for name and reputation regardless of the price.
Re:Beowulf Gushing (Score:1)
Re:my 3 nanoseconds worth... (Score:2)
Re:Beowulf Gushing (Score:2)
1. Costs - Linux is clearly cheaper
2. Reliability - Linux was clearly more reliable which has been born out. Our clusters have now been up over 3 months straigt.
3. Scalability - How does one manage 96 NT boxes in a cluster. I had no idea. Unix has things like rsh and robust scripting making this a snap
4. Portability - it was relatively easy porting our sp2 apps to linux. by the way we use Linda from SCA (Scientific Computing).
Re:Beowulf vs. IBM SP (Score:2)
here is the code for my little dsh script. very simple and rudimentary but it works. all you do is create a file with node names in it say /collection1. no security per se so maybe someone can show me how to add ssh or something else.
Let /collection contain
node1
node2
node6
node8
Usage Examples:
export BCOLL=/collection1
dsh date
dsh /nfs/tech/update_kernel.22
dsh reboot
dsh "echo node1:/nfs/data /nfs/data nfs rw,bg,hard,intr >> /etc/fstab"
The code
#/bin/ksh
if [ "$BCOLL" = "" ]
then
echo "Environment Variable BCOLL not set"
echo "Please set BCOLL to a file with list of nodes it"
echo "export BCOLL=/root/allnodes"
echo
exit
fi
if [ "$1" = "" ]
then
echo "Please provide command to run"
echo "Usage: dsh command"
echo
exit
fi
echo "Collection: $BCOLL - Command: $@ - Date:`date`" >>
for i in `cat $BCOLL`
do
echo >
echo "Running $@ on $i" >>
echo >>
rsh $i "$@" >>
done
wait
for i in `cat $BCOLL`
do
echo
"----------------------------------------------
cat
rm -f
done
Jeff Davis
Re:Beowulf and IBM (Score:2)
Beowulf Gushing (Score:3)
Re:Beowulf vs. IBM SP (Score:3)
Beowulf and IBM (Score:2)
I feel IBM will be fine for quite a while as far as their AIX systems are concerned. The beowulf project does great work on high computation problems but fall relatively short on applications require large and fast disk space. Mostly due to a lack of a fast distributed filesystem. At least this is my understanding. Down the road maybe IBM will go back to being a hardware manufacturer primarily.
Re:Beowulf vs. IBM SP (Score:1)
Please do post it. I, personally, may not use it. But that's how the community gets more robust applications. Someone does the basic fleshing out, and others add onto it what they feel they need.
Glad Linux worked out so well for you guys.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
IBM & Linux (Score:2)
Christopher A. Bohn
The bad thing about Beowulf... (Score:1)
RPM for the sole reason of trying it, and frankly,
nothing worked as promised. RPM refused to unpack
the package...
I think it would be nice of them to include a
.tar.gz package as well. The entire world does not
run Red Hat right yet.
/* Steinar */
Re:Passing the savings on to the consumer (Score:1)
I'm not convinced that gas is a 'bargain', however. Non-renewable, not horribly clean. I would like to see more oil companies become 'energy' companies, and spend more on alternative fuel sources.
And what kind of batteries DO they use in lightsabers, anyway?
Math and terminology? (Score:1)
Ummm.... Shouldn't you have said that the SP2 is 25% faster than the Beowulf? Where did you get 125%?
By my sample calculations, if the SP2 runs at a "speed" of 100, and the Beowulf at 80, then the Beowulf is 80% as fast as the SP2 (80/100)*100 = 80%
However, to see how much "faster" the SP2 is, do a percent difference calculation:
((100-80)/80)*100 = 25%
OTOH, 80*1.25 = 100, so the SP2 is 1.25 times as fast, but not 125% faster.
Re:for the love of god, rob, stop the moderation (Score:1)
Comparable what? (Score:1)
Ok, isnt the fact that they are comparable make them perform about the same? What factors were they using to determine if they were comparable? Case color?
I just thought this was a little odd.
paul
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
Re:A stain on our community (Score:2)
Re:Reliability (Score:1)
Paralogic, Inc. (Score:1)
Isn't it interesting just how small the world seems to be some days?
Re:Comparable what? (Score:1)
As for case color, the SP definately outperforms the cluster. Rows of beige cases on metal shelves hardly compare to black refridgerator-sized boxes with more blinking lights. Maybe if we build a cluster of the new SGI boxes...
I would have liked to see more details of our work in the article, but the reporter just wanted to verify that the Hess results weren't out of line. You can find more details of our results at http://topeka.cpge.utexas.edu [utexas.edu]. Feel free to email me if you'd like specific details that aren't on the webpage.
-jason
Re:or, CIOs Discover Linux Saves Shrinking Budgets (Score:2)
-jason
Re:The bad thing about Beowulf... (Score:2)
Feel free to send questions my way if you need help with this. Or check out any of the documentation at http://www.beowulf-underground.org/ [beowulf-underground.org].
-jason
Passing the savings on to the consumer (Score:2)
Oh wait, what was I thinking?
Linux & Kerberos (Score:1)
Phasing out System 390s??? Doubt it! (Score:1)
Re:Reliability (Score:1)
Re:Reliability (Score:1)
Pvm is just a bunch of functions that allow you to pass messages between threads. It contains functions to handle node failures. However, it is left up to the application programmer to catch them.
or, CIOs Discover Linux Saves Shrinking Budgets (Score:1)
Their save (Score:2)
I was quite confused about this a second. How could they possibly have saved anything by buying NT instead of using Linux? They would have to port 2M LoC rather than write a bit of custom management for the cluster.
But then I realised that they would have saved (only) a few $100.000 if they used NT instead of the IBM SP2. Now they seem to save $1.870.000 by opting for Linux! (Minus the cost of writing custom code)
Re:Their save (Score:1)
Also, the fewCK was apparently before the cost of rewriting everything.
Re:Hooray! (Score:1)
72,000 PII/266's running around the clock, and are
completing about
On the subject, I really like what they're doing with the cosm project [mithral.com]. Think generic distributed.net, people can put in their own projects, put up their own reward system, it's the world's largest beowulf cluster -- okay, not strictly speaking but it's still a hell of a lot of horsepower.
Re:First one, haha (Score:1)
Beowulf vs. IBM SP (Score:3)
The SP does have a fairly robust management toolset (PSSP) and uses kerberos with parallel commands for secure multi-node management.
To be honest, I haven't read up on the capabilities of Beowulf but the impression I get from the article is that Hess had to write some apps to approximate the management capabilities of the SP.
Two questions:
1) Did Hess have to write these apps because Beowulf has a weak management system, or did they have to write them because Beowulf has a functional system that is different from what they were used to?
2) Any chance that these management apps would be available under the GPL? Or even that more details about how they configured their systems will be posted?
I'd love to be able to show my customers what Linux can do. Maybe Jeff Davis from the above post can shed some light on this.
Ted Richardson
Reliability (Score:1)
Perhaps somebody should organize a contest to test reliability. Anybody wanna bribe^H^H^H^H^H er... pay off^H^H^H^H
Hooray! (Score:1)
Re:Hooray! (Score:1)
Re:A stain on our community (Score:2)
Re:is it just me... (Score:2)
Seriously thought, while the article states that they would have saved several hundred thousand dollars by going to NT, they were able to save even MORE money by going with Linux. Also, it appears (and I may be reading too much between the lines here) that they also felt that the programmign aspect of the move would be easier if porting to a *nix-like operating system, rather than to Windows.
Just some thoughts from a guy ripping out all the NT server machines at his work and replacing them and the RS6000's with linux boxen.
my 3 nanoseconds worth... (Score:1)
seriously though, I ain't no Howard Hughes, but it seems bizzare to me that from a budget of $250 million they spend
Who's running that show, the Clampetts?
Is this Al Gore?? (Score:1)
Thanks for the Code! (Score:1)
I have a few more questions:
First one, haha (Score:2)
Vidar Leathershod
Re:Man, I would love to run Beowulf on one of thes (Score:1)
Re:Passing the savings on to the consumer (Score:1)
is it just me... (Score:1)
Re:Yippie!! (Score:2)
http://cnls.lanl.gov/Internal/Computing/Avalon/