[Beowulf] Fwd: Project Natick

[Lux, Jim (337K)]

That is a most excellent book. And it brings to mind some of the more complex aspects of maintenance for that cluster.

I think that’s actually an important area for cluster development – most of the work, to date, has been in building high performance computing in environments that are easily accessible.  *I* have always been interested in HPC in inaccessible or rugged environments. If you want a cluster computer at Europa, you need reliability and remote maintainability, without a full duplex ethernet connection with low latency. If you want to do hard core signal processing (say archaeological radar or seismic processing) in the jungle, where your connection to home is a 9600 bps Iridium satphone.

While there are interesting engineering challenges in building a 1000 core cluster in a building to which you can back a truck up to; now think about how you’d build/manage/repair that cluster when the light time delay is 30 minutes, and it takes a year to get there.



From: Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of "beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Reply-To: John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com>
Date: Thursday, June 7, 2018 at 8:39 AM
To: "beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Fwd: Project Natick

The report interestingly makes a comparison to cruise lines and the US Navy having large IT infrastructures at sea.
I guess cruise ships of course have servers plus satcomms, as do warships.
But the thought of the SOSUS sonar chain comes to mind... then again those electronics will be down a lot deeper than this.
Though I am sure a few racks of FPGAs near your SOSUS listening devices would be good...

Going wildly off topic as usual this book https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/08/us/a-tale-of-daring-american-submarine-espionage.html
about Operation Ivy Bells is fantastic  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20180608/7c969ae6/attachment-0001.html>