High performance computing is a fun time. How many places can you say your code used 2 terabytes of RAM and run for 10 days on 1000 computers? It is also a place that takes and hardware and pushes as fast as it can. With all this power there needs to a way of keeping it up and running not to waste money. That is why having a great OS it important.
As can be on the top 500 super computer website Linux is king here. Now Redhat an SUSE have been around a long time and have the most support for the super computer hardware and software. Redhat has a very nice cluster OS built on top of it called Rocks. I found this when I had to get a cluster up and running and I was impressed about how simple it was. I took about the same time and installing windows and updating all the drives as it did to install a 17 node cluster and be ready to go. Other cluster OSs are out there like OSCAR, Gluster, or Warewulf. Now I have only used Rocks but as I surf the website I find everyone seems to support Rocks, so I think it is becoming very popular. The reason is, it is so easy to use. To install more it puts packages in "Rolls". So anyone can make these rolls and it easy to install that software. So if you want to build a HPC cluster you should check out Rocks.
Installing software on clusters seems to be the hardest part. There can be a lot of nodes so
that is the main reason a cluster OS is important. Now one way around the OS is just a powerfully installer. In the Debain/Ubuntu world there is a project called fully automated install. I think this approach could be better. I have been using Ubuntu for some time and think it has a lot of good things going for it. Just so far I have not seen much in the way of cluster OS for it. It seems it started slow in the server realm, but is picking up speed. If that is the case then it needs to find a way of getting on HPCs in my view.
One of the reasons I like Ubuntu is the power of the .deb it took from Dedian. I think if Ubuntu/Dedain just start build the tools needed for cluster and made an cluster package manager like Synaptics. If it could all be done in an easy and to use yet powerfully way they could take on Redhat in the HPC world. If I was smarter and know what I was doing I think this would be fun project to take on. Perhaps someday...
1 comment:
It looks like this OS usage chart on the 500 super comuter site shows that Windows has about 6 machines currently in the running. I thought it would be less, honestly.
I especially like the article of Sun and Ubuntu rumors that was in one of your Cnet article links. Here's to hoping that 1: Sun makes it easier to install a good Java VM on Ubuntu and 2: Sun gets ZFS technology working the right way in Ubuntu.
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