[Beowulf] clusters of beagles

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

My idea was not to make a computational speed demon, but more to see if it
can be done with cheap boards.
I’ve done the mini-ITX cluster (with wireless 802.11B, no less) starting
with Knoppix Live-CD, and it was educational.


James Lux, P.E.
Task Manager, DHFR Space Testbed
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive, MS 161-213
Pasadena CA 91109
+1(818)354-2075
+1(818)395-2714 (cell)
 





On 1/28/17, 10:53 AM, "Charlie Peck" <charliep at cs.earlham.edu> wrote:

>
>> On Jan 28, 2017, at 10:04, Lux, Jim (337C) <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
>>wrote:
>
>> On 1/28/17, 6:39 AM, "Skylar Thompson" <skylar.thompson at gmail.com>
>>wrote:
>> 
>>> On 01/27/2017 12:14 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>>>> The pack of Beagles do have local disk storage (there¹s a 2GB flash on
>>>> board with a Debian image that it boots from).
>>>> 
>>>> The LittleFe depends on the BCDD (i.e. ³CD rom with cluster image²,
>>>> actually a USB stick) which is the sort of thing I was hoping for, but
>>>> it
>>>> is x86.
>>>> OTOH, maybe that¹s a pattern to start with.  the BCDD also runs out of
>>>> RAM, which may or may not be a good model.
>>>> 
>>>> An interesting challenge
>>> 
>>> BCCD actually does support a "liberated" mode (RAM disk copied to
>>> persistent storage). We're also not tied to x86 - we actually used to
>>> have a PPC port, and are considering supporting ARM now that there's
>>> some educational-scale HPC platforms (small multi-core boards w/ 2+GB
>>> RAM, GPGPU, wifi, on-board wired Ethernet) available.
>>> 
>>> Skylar
>> Yes, I saw that..
>
>The LittleFe project has tried to build systems with reasonable balance
>between CPU, RAM (quantity and throughput), and network speeds so that
>even though you were working in a small environment the general patterns
>of speed-up and scaling that you observed would hold when you moved to
>“big iron”. Until very recently that meant that the smallest form-factor
>board we could use was mini-ITX, nothing smaller supported multiple cores
>and gigabit Ethernet. More recently we have looked for on-board
>accelerator support as well. Now that boards like the Asus Tinker [1]
>board are coming out we may be able to reduce size and cost
>significantly. 
>
>charlie
>