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Linux Software

News From Super Computer 99 33

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-other-conference dept.
Donald "I fixed Rob's X Key" Becker wrote in to report from that other conference that is happening right now: Super Computing 99. Reports and picture of the freebies, the parties, and a somewhat surprising extra little sponsor.
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News From Super Computer 99 More

News From Super Computer 99

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  • When I spoke the one of the respresentatives at Cray they said that SGI wouldnt own them for long. Thats why they had separate booths.

  • Imagine a full-page ad:

    The Free Beer is brought to your by Microsoft; the Free Speech is brought to you by the FSF.

    --
    It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
  • http://legion.virginia.edu [virginia.edu]

    It doesn't replace Beowulf; it's better for... certain (OK, many many) applications. If you need to run across a larger network than a Beowulf, Legion is for you. If you need non-physical layer security, Legion is for you. If you need supercomputing power doled out to your academic office, but aren't at a cluster yourself and don't know which one elsewhere has time available, Legion is for you. If you're in a university research lab and you want to put your machine to even better use than distributed.net or seti@home, Legion is for you - you can run Legion jobs in the wee hours of the morning. If you need to work across platforms, whether Linux or SGI Irix, etc., Legion is for you. (although I'm told the NT build is deliberately broken :-)

    Legion doesn't work at the kernel level, so it's quite different from Beowulf. AFAIK a legion machine can itself be a Beowulf cluster though. Woo woo!

  • From some points of view, keeping those people from achieving anything is a pretty succesful strategy. Unfortunately for them, they're snobs : they haven't worked out that academics make things possible, but engineers make them happen.

    Think what would have happened if they'd hired RMS and LT 10 years ago.
  • As the saying goes:
    Sex, Beer, and Unix....well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
  • Black Parrot wrote:

    Perhaps Rob should issue separate pools of "up" and "down" points. If the losers go beserk, he can increase the quota of "down" points in proportion. Meanwhile, you always have a base supply of "up" points for more positive uses.


    I've sugggested this before; I think it would be great! There really are more productive uses for moderator points as currently distributed, though -- but it would be great to have some counterbalance to malicious jerks ... there's no true antidote to someone who wants to mess up your day, but little things help.

    timothy


  • on the pros and cons of M$ sponsership: "we can buy more beer with the money" heh:-)
  • Rob/CmdrTaco...

    If you chance to read this, perhaps it would be wise to add a limit on posts within a certain amount of time from an IP. Just a suggestion.

    Jonathan Wang

  • moderators - don't waste your points! (Score:3)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @04:49PM (#1523846) Journal
    If you should chance to read the several identical postings here, they're all the same taunt. At least he's honest - he wants to make people waste their moderator points.

    Moderating down an anonymous coward is probably a worse way to use your points than using them to bump up the things you think deserve to be seen.

    Besides, Natalie Portman probably doesn't have *both* of the things this guy attributes to her in his own ee cummings semi-referential kind of way ...

    timothy

  • Yes, but if we've learned anything from the overclocked 247MHz 486SX [totl.net] (which we haven't), it's that hard liquor makes computers run much faster than beer.
  • "It came from SegFault" -- Film at 11.

    Anyhow, what was the joke about Donald "NIC God" Becker? ...I guess he fixed Rob's 'X' key or something.

    Microsoft? Well, their Research arm ponders interesting things. Like Supercomputers are only one step away from the Microsoft Borg mentality. (I'd post a link, but I've done that before, and it's not hard to find off of research.microsoft.com, I think it was called Millenium if you're interested) And maybe they're trying to make up for 18 years of rather less-than-super computing thanks to them. :) I'm not holding my breath.

    And unless you're dead and bloated or something, SGI having Linux boxes shouldn't come as a surprise at all. They've already basically said that instead of wasting their time to port IRIX to lots of architectures, it's easier for them to port all the cool stuff to Linux, get more people using their stuff, and get recognition for it too. I'll be happy to see how much of it they've released. (I'm not holding my breath until a lot of people have XFS working as a high-performance filesystem on Linux, but it looks good so far. :)
    ---
    pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
  • > Moderating down an anonymous coward is probably a worse way to use your points than using them to bump up the things you think deserve to be seen.

    Perhaps Rob should issue separate pools of "up" and "down" points. If the losers go beserk, he can increase the quota of "down" points in proportion. Meanwhile, you always have a base supply of "up" points for more positive uses.

    --
    It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?

  • BEER! (Score:5)

    by cronio ( 13526 ) on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @04:44PM (#1523852) Homepage
    Just before the party, Eadline was approached by Tod Needham of Microsoft Research who suggested that he would like Microsoft to help underwrite the party. A quick meeting by the organizers was held on the trade show floor to discuss the various political and community consequences of accepting money from Microsoft until it was pointed out that "We can buy more beer with the money".

    So the secret comes out eh? It turns out Beowulf clusters are run on BEER!
    I've done some research, and it seems that: (Lots of comps) + (Lots of beer) + Beowulf > (Lots of comps) + Beowulf alone.
    The reason for this is that beer was shown to actually do the opposite for computers as it does for men. It INCREASES memory and speed, meaning male computers no longer have an excuse for not remembering that ugly looking female's phone number.

  • To come: "Linux is an integral part of Windows" (Score:3)

    by cthompso ( 2283 ) on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @07:55PM (#1523853)
    MS sponsorship does seems suspect. It's funny though, someone else pointed out Microsoft Research is an "intellectual roach motel"--they've been spending enormous sums hiring every academician they can throughout this decade, and have not one achievement to show for it.
  • You can't have a supercomputer without...
    DAS BLINKEN LIGHTS!!!

  • The NT build isn't deliberately broken. It's just not our number one priority and the person working on it would much rather be doing other things. For example, the VA Linux party that's going on right now which I missed the bus for. :)

    Seriously, though, Legion is pretty cool and everyone should take a look at it. It's really pulled itself together nicely in the last year or so. And to prevent any flamewars, Beowulf and Legion cater to slightly different markets and purposes, and each do their job well.

    Cheers,
    -jdm

  • No problem.

    I don't care about karma.

    -cow
  • Here's the Supercomputing Con web site [sc99.org].

    Interesting that SGI and Cray had seperate displays... I would hope it was just to appeal to the Cray crowd...

    More notes please! Thanks for the first report!




    -S. Louie
  • Beowulf clusters have notoriously bad security. This should help.

    ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
    Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.

    Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
    mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das
    rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
    pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.


    --
  • lol, it was actually entertaining to read all of cow's posts. i'm sick of all this "go ac to avoid being moderated down" bullshit.

    PEOPLE CARE TOO MUCH ABOUT THEIR KARMA.

    Moderation is overrated anyway. It's easier to just set my threshold zero or -1 and wade through the crap. Anyone who sets there threshold above one is just asking to limit themselves to a narrow scope of posts, with the occasional good remark sprinkled in.
  • Jeez, Sun really like you guys out west. All we got at the umn CS&E open house were measly yellow yo-yo's with the sun logo. Oh well

  • Beowulf, Beowulf, Beowulf. what about mosix? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @05:57PM (#1523865)
    Hmm, a search of all these comments yields no hits on "mosix". Hmm. Never heard of mosix, eh? Well, take a look at http://www.mosix.org Mosix offers transparent mid-execution migration of processes and dynamic load balancing. The kernel is made aware of the cluster rather than the user processes. I tried it out the other day, (the installation was pretty simple, the only problems I had had nothing to do with mosix) and I have to say it's pretty impressive. I'm by no means an expert, but mosix does seem a lot cooler to me than beowulf, at least from what I've seen and read. Once installed and set up, you can just kind of forget about it and it automatically moves processes around from node to node *while they are running* to balance the load on the cluster, totally transparently. Really cool. You can of course manually direct process migration.

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