[Beowulf] why we need cheap, open learning clusters

[Christopher Samuel]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 13/05/13 03:55, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> It starts to look like significant capital equipment, with only 
> authorized service, compliance with corporate/institutional IT 
> security rules: Do you have all your patches up to date?

I guess that depends on whether your system is exposed to the outside
world I'd say.

> Are you running the institutional virus checker?.

I once helped out a group of people in the mid 2000's who ran into
just that issue - their organisations ITSEC SOPs mandated they run a
virus checker once a day on their HPC cluster.

Fortunately the blessed virus checker had a Linux version, but
unfortunately their fileserver was AIX.  So they ended up running it
on the management node over NFS.

It wasn't a problem for a while until they had built up a reasonably
amount of data (did I mention this was for bioinfomatics amongst other
things?) and it started taking more than 24 hours to run it once.
You can see where this is going can't you?

Anyway, after a couple of management node meltdowns they managed to
get their IT security folks to accept that perhaps they could get away
with compiling ClamAV for AIX and running it on the file server itself
where it could do minimal damage...

cheers,
Chris
- -- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/

iEYEARECAAYFAlGZx0kACgkQO2KABBYQAh/yGgCfVmYU2OYAU68iCOokuTlm/bft
r48Aniy47f8V6WFjwjbXAtATUMDKtgW6
=fScY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----