hpr podcast - clusters

[davijordan]

I was listening to the hacker public radio beginning podcast about clusters. I really enjoyed it. By the definition that was given for a cluster, almost say most geeks could be classified as each having a super computer at home.

[akuma624]

Awesome - I'll make sure to grab a copy to listen to on the way to work.

[allix]

does having a laptop and a desktop count as a cluster
I know someone who definitely has enough machines to be illegible to roll out a cluster

[davijordan]

I was just expressing the author's definition and then extrapolating it. There is a live cd of parallel knoppix. i also think they have changed their distro name to Pelicanhpc. Where you can set up a cluster real easy with a live cd. How you would take advantage of it is another story. You could take a decent machine and add several say diskless pxeboot p1's or better and you are in business, That would be interesting to add "folding at home" and see what kind of performance you might get. That gives me an idea. I might try that in our ltsp lab using thin clients as nodes! Just to see the bogomips would be interesting.

per Disttrowatch:
pelicanhpc PelicanHPC GNU Linux is a new name of what used to be known as ParallelKnoppix, a live CD project with a goal to make it simple to set up a high performance computing cluster. Now based on Debian GNU/Linux (rather than KNOPPIX), the project has announced the release of PelicanHPC 1.3. From the changelog: "make_pelican allows a password to be specified, the default is still 'live'; make_pelican allows you to specify a storage device to mount as /home, the default is still to use a ramdisk; the setup routine has been greatly improved. At this point, I think that Pelican is in good shape. I am not planning on making more releases until several months from now, unless some important bug surfaces." Visit the project's home page to read the release announcement. The CD images are available for download via BitTorrent: pelican32-v1.3.iso (345MB), pelican64-v1.3.iso (357MB).

[Patrick]

We interviewed clustering guru Doug Eadline in episode 206:
http://www.tllts.org/audio/tllts_206-08-22-07.ogg
http://www.tllts.org/audio/tllts_206-08-22-07.mp3