I dropped a PC on my toe yesterday. I have been rooting through all my carcasses of computers, looking for more and better RAM for the cluster nodes. A pc slipped out of my hands while I was lifting it…
So far, I have 512MB in the master node. Once I found that much, I tried to install rocksclusters again. No dice. ROCKS really looks like the best set of tools for my purposes. I’m going to have to try to get it to install on small machines like the ones that I have. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 4. Which Distro, cont’d.’
Well, I did a google for ‘Debian Clustering’ and I found the link in the previous post to the Debian DCC package.
I downloaded that, and am installing it as we speak. In looking at the search results, I clicked the second link, and got to the beowulf.org site, which had an article about using DCC, which basically said that it was not as well rounded as something called ROCKS. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 3. rocksclusters.org’
We all know that outside of the hardware, the OS is the most important component of a well behaved system. But this issue becomes more complex when you start to build a cluster environment because maintenance becomes more of a hassle.
The reason for this is that so much is shared in a clustered environment. Lets just talk about something simple like drivers, and the kernel: Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 2. The Distro’
For many years I wanted to have a cluster. Mostly for the challenge of setting it up, but also to learn about what kinds of applications work best in a clustered environment.I started with a group of identical 486 boxes purchased from Laclede Computer Trading. These were adequate machines to learn to build with, but I quickly outstripped them, mostly because the OS’es dont support the old hardware they have. Continue reading ‘Cluster pt 1. Hardware’
I found this neat thing…a screensaver that shows live images of network surveillance cameras worldwide.
Not working on a Mac at the moment, I have to wait till the Linux version is out…though if I really felt like it I could probably port it. Nah.
Anyway, the search string that they use to find the source images is
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:%22jpg/image.jpg%3Fr%3D%22
So, being bored out of my mind at work, as usual, I found what looks like a camera watching a tank full of manatees. At least I think they are manatees. Every now and then some food shows up on the surface of the pool, and sometimes you can catch the reflection of a person walking by the tank. I usually size a window to the picture and let it sit in the corner of my screen, and watch the manatee’s, or what ever they are, drift about.
I get home, and I don’t wanna watch TV. It’s only a bit chilly out, its temperate, and verry humid.These days, I’ve got projects that cant seem to finish on time. It’s really starting to get annoying, and i want to start yelling at programmers, but that wouldn’t help the situation.
It’s autumn, and this is how autumn goes. Projects slow down, money dries up, and you settle in to try to make it with what you have, and deliver the best possible to your end users…
You know, I haven’t posted to the blog in a while - I think to myself…
Not much to say here, this is more of a proof of concept post, from my Blackberry, on the bus. Heh.
Well, as you can see not much activity over here lately.
I’m busy as HELL at work. I’m building things here at home, trying to fix my toilet, and working on getting the cluster in the basement to run MM5. In the process of doing that, I tried to upgrade the OpenSSI clustering tools that i was using.
That was a mistake, because now i’ve broken the cluster completely, and have to start from scratch. I really loved that OpenSSI toolkit. it made getting up and running super easy. Now, there are certain things built into the OS, but there’s not really a set of tools that you can use to build the environment that I want, and make it easy-one-stop-shopping.
So, I’m going to begin to document my experiences re-building the cluster in a set of articles here.
Enjoy.
