[Beowulf] Survey on beowulf.org -- and a drawing for a video iPod

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Sean Dilda wrote:

> Tim Cutts wrote:
>
>> I find the initial question essentially impossible to answer.  The whole 
>> point of beowulf computing is that you can build it out of almost anything. 
>> Most of the software is community driven.  The ideas are community driven. 
>> The leaders are the community, not any one company.  The hardware is 
>> commodity.  I can't even name one when pushed to; I don't use any cluster 
>> software I had to buy, and the vendors who made my hardware are pretty much 
>> incidental - I could have used anyone.
>> 
>> And that answer to the first question makes the subsequent questions even 
>> more impossible to answer.
>> 
>
> I'm glad I'm not the only one that had that problem.   For any relatively 
> large site, you're going to end up with a mostly custom configuration, even 
> if you start with a vendor's products.

Ya, well, I just said exactly that in my own response.  Question one is
a text box, at least, not a bulleted list.

That does make many of the rest of the questions a bit "odd" to answer,
but with a small chance at a real live iPod at stake, heck, I put down
SOMETHING for the answers and leave it up to the survey designers to
interpret the results.

Of course if I win I'm stuck with the usual problem that AFAIK the ipod
won't play oggs, mp3's are encumbered and a lawsuit waiting to happen,
and apple's own format, while maybe not exactly closed, is not what my
40GB ogg music collection is in and I do NOT want to go back and rerip
all of my CDs (since of course I am absolutely religious about not
violating the DMCA -- or at least not by much -- and only rip within the
confines of prior personal ownership and acceptable use).  So I'd rather
have a 60 GB iRiver, actually, or something else linux/ogg
friendly...;-)

     rgb

>
>
> For the cluster I setup here at Duke, its run by open source applications 
> that were pieced together by hand instead of being part of a packaged cluster 
> distro.    A friend of mine used to run a pre-packaged setup (Rocks, I 
> believe).  After a year of that, he came to me and asked how I set mine up. 
> He found that having everything put together for him meant he knew how none 
> of the pieces worked together, so he was lost when something broke.  Being 
> able to build the pieces himself allowed him to see how the setup worked 
> together and be better able to diagnose problems on site.
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-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu