[Beowulf] Random numbers (was Re: /dev/random entropy on stateless/headless nodes)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2011, Peter St. John wrote:

> The use of the system resource /dev/random is more for cryptography, than
> for scientific simulations. Some application like SSH is blocking (in
> Stuart's situation) when the entropy pool is empty.Peter

Find attached a nearly complete solution.  This is a "one liner"
(almost) xinetd daemon that will read and spit out a four byte uint from
/dev/urandom over a network socket connection to port 8885.  Install the
(bash) script on your head node, which hopefully is on an ethernet and
has a keyboard and has enough boot-time entropy to make /dev/urandom
work.

Installation and testing instructions are included, sort of, but I am
NOT providing a tutorial on security and ports and allowed networks, so
if you don't want everybody on the internet to be able to get random
numbers from your server, you'll have to figure out how to take the
appropriate steps on your own (it's not difficult, lines in the xinetd
config and/or additions to the iptables firewall rules will do it).

The only other thing you'll need (that I'm not providing) is a script or
binary on the client side that will connect to the daemon, send it
CR/LF, read the uint return, and write it to e.g. /dev/random if that's
what it takes to build up enough entropy.  Note well that there isn't
any reason I can think of to do this a uint at a time other than it was
a convenient increment for reseeding, nothing more.  So you can increase
the size of the dd block to a full page or even more if you like, for
substantially greater efficiency.

Note well that this is just one way to do it.  Perl would let you be
more sophisticated (bash is a crude tool and can't cope with binary).  C
is far more elegant, and you can write a C-based daemon that would seed
from /dev/random, use a really good rng, and optionally maintain a
self-avoiding table of rands it has returned if you want to use the
return as a seed.  Even with the current daemon, you can make it read in
the requested number of random bytes and return it.  Tweak away.

    rgb

> 
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Heiko Bauke <heiko.bauke at snafu.de> wrote:
>       Hi,
>
>       On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:48:28 -0500 (EST)
>       "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
>
>       > The solution for nearly anyone needing large numbers of fast,
>       high
>       > quality random numbers is going to be:  Use a fast, high
>       quality
>       > random number generator from e.g. the Gnu Scientific Library,
>       and
>       > >>seed<< it from /dev/random, ensuring uniqueness of the
>       seed(s)
>       > >>across the cluster
>
>       I agree that for Monte Carlo simulations a fast, high quality
>       (pseudo)
>       random number generator (PRNG) is more appropriate than
>       /dev/{u}random.
>       However, seeding a PRNG randomly is imho a missconception. Even
>       though
>       Monte Carlo algorithms utilize a pseudo random resource the
>       final
>       result of a Monte Carlo simulation should be deterministic and
>       reproducible. Therefore, for scientific Monte Carlo applications
>       one
>       should use a known seed. Parallel Monte Carlo applications may
>       derive
>       streams of pseudo random numbers from a common base sequence by
>       splitting and leap frogging, see also
>       http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0609584
> 
>
>              Regards,
>
>              Heiko
> 
>
>       --
>       -- Number Crunch Blog @ http://numbercrunch.de
>       --  Cluster Computing @ http://www.clustercomputing.de
>       --     Random numbers @ http://trng.berlios.de
>       --        Heiko Bauke @
>       http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/personalhomes/bauke
> 
>
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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
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