[ubuntu-uk] High Performance Computing

[Ian Pascoe]

G'day all

Anyone out there involved with, or has theoretical  experience with HPC
using clusters?  Before I approach the various projects and make myself look
a complete twonk, I'd appreciate some views and thoughts.  Please?

Been looking at Rocks Clusters (http://www.rockclusters.org) which provides
the HPC platform based on REL 4, and the Linux Terminal Server project.  The
reason is a theoretical one of utilising redundant computing power, ie old
out of spec machines that are to be chucked, in an environmentally nice way.

So the solution I came up with was to run the computing nodes as diskless
work stations, getting their kernal / apps from the LTSP server, and dealing
with the cluster server for the work queue.  This sounds pretty straight
forward to me.

However, all references I find to cluster computing shows that the computing
nodes each are headless systems; which is fine but I wanted to look at
reducing the green footprint by taking the heavy power requirements out of
the equation, ie the HDDs etc.

I have already identified some technical aspects that knock this on the
head - the main one being I envisage two seperate ethernet networks, one for
LTSP and the other for the cluster, but neither software supports more than
one NIC on a terminal / computing node.

The next problem is that of storage space on the diskless terminal.  By
utilising the LTSP server as the processor rather spoils the whole thing, so
I've looked at the terminal running the kernal and any apps locally, using
the LTSP server to host the files required by the kernal / apps to run.
This will reduce the load on the LTSP network.  However, the terminal will
still require to store stuff temporarily, like the swap partition, so I
thought about using either flash drives, too expensive, or USB pen drives,
preferred.

I chose Rocks over other projects mainly due to it's pedigree and support
infrastructure, and LTSP as it seems to work with practically everything.

"But why?" I hopefully hear you groan.  As I say it's all theoretical, but
doing some research there is certainly need for this type of setup.  Maybe
not for a top level production system, but one that just plods along and
does the job.

Sorry, I know it's not exactly Ubuntu orientated  .... but this area really
interests me.

E