I did some pretty sweet stuff at work today. Well, OK. In
the morning was just big fixes and the usual maintenance stuff.
But Afternoon was awesome!!!
I know it is kinda lame, but we made a cluster. 🙂
See, it is now officially between semesters, so the guy downstairs, who
is my good great friend, who runs the labs, says we can play in the
labs. Well, clusterKnoppix and Quantian are a couple of damned
sweet boot cd’s. If you don’t know Knoppix is a very cool boot CD
for linux. Basically, you boot from this CD instead of your HD,
and it runs linux. It runs linux very well. It autodetects
all the hardware. Well, clusterKnoppix as you can imagine is a
Knoppix tailored for clusters. Knoppix has built in terminal
server support, so you boot Knoppix, or in this case Quantian.
Quantian is just a math and stats tailored version of clusterKnoppix,
it has some applications such as GNU R, and Octave that Knoppix
normally would not have.
WHEW, I know I’m totally ranting and not finishing a complete thought, but I don’t give a damn.
So you boot the CD, and click on the menu to start the terminal
server. Well, this starts DHCP, TFTP, and NFS so that all the
other PC’s on the LAN can boot Knoppix. Even without the cluster
stuff this is pretty damned cool. With the cluster stuff this is
just awesome. We were able to bring up a 16node, 16Ghz, 3.2GB RAM
cluster in around 20 minutes.
So far the pitfalls are that it is general process clustering only via
openMosix. Don’t get me wrong, this is awesome, but PVM, MPI
configuration would be sweet too.
So, to anyone lame enough to read this… Is this geek enough for you? j/k 😉