Re: HPC with Beoqulf

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Patrick Schmid
<[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi Carsten
>
> It has to be a HPC cause it's a given challenge: "Build a Linux HPC
> with ethernet"
>
> 2011/1/14 Carsten Aulbert <[email protected]>:
> > * what is the (typical) problem you want to solve?
>
> The goal is to split up the load of computing a job to multiple nodes.
>
> > * what software do you need for that, do you need a batch scheduler or do
> you
> > have very few users which work at the same place and share the cluster
> without
> > technical measures?
>
> second one.
>
> > * think about the OS (Debian is a good choice here ;))
>
> OS isn't chosen yet.
> But i can handle nearly every Linux distribution, so I'm free in that
> point. Depends on which distribution the needed software is running.
>
> > * Think about the compute hardware, you probably need a login node,
> execute
> > nodes and a file server, do you need many local cores or are the problems
> too
> > large to fit into a few nodes? Then you need to look into networking
> > (Infiniband or high performance Ethernet), is the software susceptible to
> > latency and/or bandwidth available......
>
> there are 7 sun fire x4000 with ethernet (infiniband would get to
> expensiv).
> I don't need much storage, but I could use NAS if needed.
>
> > You see there are MANY questions to look at first, before you even want
> to
> > start installing the machines :)
>
> I see ;)
>
> > Try describing a "typical" problem, the sizes involved, that may help a
> lot.
>
> So you have a script / job you need to compute, and need a fast way to
> to that. That's typically it ;)
> My imagination is, that you upload this script to a master node, which
> splits it up and distributes the parts to its nodes.
>
> hope you can understand :)
>
> What do you think? Still possible to do that with Beowulf?
>
> Cheers
> Patrick
>

Well, auto partitioning like that isn't the way things are done, even with
vector machines. The computation needs to be split manually. There are some
dandy tools to help and some fine prepackaged applications you might be able
to use. What is your experience in computing, and what kind of expertise do
you have access to?

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