[Beowulf] General cluster management tools - Re: Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

[holway at th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de]

> I've done 4 nodes a bunch of times, and that seems a bit too trivial.
> Heck, there's a lot of people who have 4 computers in their office,
> forming a defacto heterogenous cluster.

I have a four node HP DL380 G8 cluster that im using to benchmark storage
devices at the moment.  I'm using a commercial, closed source cluster
management suite to manage it. I'm not actually a very good Linux admin so
for me it really is a PITA to provision and manage these machines using
anything other than a full cluster management suite. I have no idea how to
set up LDAP for instance. :)

It will probably save me a month of time over the 6 month project. the
sheer magic of being able to break an operating system, flick the power
switch, and have it up and running with a virgin system image is magic! :)
Especially handy with switching between OFED stacks for instance.

Ive been designing and installing(but not operating) supercomputers for a
while and the skills you need to put these things together efficiently is
insane. I might be good at it in another 10 years. These types of
supercomputer toys are really essential for getting peoples heads around
these types of problems.

I'd really like to know what challenges people are facing in this area.
Specific pain points.

<plug>Its Bright Cluster Manager. No, I dont work for them but they did
give me free licences. Yes its pretty good :)</plug>

>
>
> There's also that "as soon as we were able to source sufficient..."
> statement...
>
> And I *still* think that a cluster of arduinos would be fun, albeit slow.
> Is there a (limited) MPI implementation?  There's some interesting I/O
> devices for arduino that might be intriguing in this context.. the 8x8
> multicolor LED displays for instance.
>
> Jim Lux
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On
> Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
> Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 6:55 AM
> To: Beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: [Beowulf] Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer
>
>
> http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/features/raspberry_pi_supercomputer.shtml
>
> Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer
>
> Professor Cox comments: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient
> Raspberry Pi computers.”
>
> runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket
>
>
> “The team wants to see this low-cost system as a starting point to inspire
> and enable students to apply high-performance computing and data handling
> to tackle complex engineering and scientific challenges as part of our
> on-going outreach activities.”
>
> James Cox says: “The Raspberry Pi is great fun and it is amazing that I
> can hold it in my hand and write computer programs or play games on it.”
>
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