[Beowulf] Introduction and question

[Douglas Eadline]

It should also be pointed out that the early Beowulf
community was largely composed of engineers, computer scientists,
biologists, chemists, and physicists. Of course all
technical backgrounds, but with a common goal -- cheaper,
better, faster.

By definition the Beowulf community (1) has always been
very welcoming. New ideas and diversity have been our
strength.

--
Doug

(1) I am just now trying to define what that Beowulf Community
is, what it does, and what it can do in the future. More to follow.

> "Many employers look for people who studied humanities and learned IT by
> themselves, for their wider appreciation of human values."
>
> Mark Burgess
>
> https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/jesa_0201_issue.pdf
>
> On 2/23/19 4:30 PM, Will Dennis wrote:
>>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I thought I’d give a brief introduction, and see if this list is a
>> good fit for my questions that I have about my HPC-“ish”
>> infrastructure...
>>
>> I am a ~30yr sysadmin (“jack-of-all-trades” type), completely
>> self-taught (B.A. is in English, that’s why I’m a sysadmin :-P) and
>> have ended up working at an industrial research lab for a large
>> multi-national IT company (http://www.nec-labs.com). In our lab we
>> have many research groups (as detailed on the aforementioned website)
>> and a few of them are now using “HPC” technologies like Slurm, and
>> I’ve become the lead admin for these groups. Having no prior
>> background in this realm, I’m learning as fast as I can go :)
>>
>> Our “clusters” are collections of 5-30 servers, all collections bought
>> over years and therefore heterogeneous hardware, all with
>> locally-installed OS (i.e. not trad head-node with PXE-booted diskless
>> minions) which is as carefully controlled as I can make it via
>> standard OS install via Cobbler templates, and then further configured
>> via config management (we use Ansible.) Networking is basic 10GbE
>> between nodes (we do have Infiniband availability on one cluster, but
>> it’s fell into disuse now since the project that has required it has
>> ended.) Storage is one or more traditional NFS servers (some use ZFS,
>> some not.) We have within the past few years adopted Slurm WLM for a
>> job-scheduling system on top of these collections, and now are up to
>> three different Slurm clusters, with I believe a fourth on the way.
>>
>> My first question for this list is basically “do I belong here?” I
>> feel there’s a lot of HPC concepts it would be good for me to learn,
>> so as I can improve the various research group’s computing
>> environments, but not sure if this list is for much larger “true HPC”
>> environments, or would be a good fit for a “HPC n00b” like me...
>>
>> Thanks for reading, and let me know your opinions :)
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Will
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>


-- 
Doug