HPC for Primates http://www.clustermonkey.net/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:55:54 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.clustermonkey.net//images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.clustermonkey.net/ HPC for Primates http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/234/2/ Or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation Recently, I had a chance to talk with Eric Thibodeau about his Google Summer of Code Cluster project. It seems Eric and Donnie Berkholz have been working hard on Using Gentoo, Seed Linux and Catalyst, to provide an easy access to a Beowulf clustering/HPC environment to everyday users. i.e. a live cluster Gentoo CD/DVD. The following is Eric's status report. News - Select News Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:39:21 +0100 http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/220/32/ Storage: its where we put things Clusters have become the dominant type of HPC systems but that doesn't mean they aren't perfect (sounds like a Dr. Phil show doesn't it?). While you get a huge bang for the buck from them, somehow you have to get the data to and from the processors. Moreover, some applications have fairly benign IO requirements and others need really large amounts of IO. Regardless of your IO requirements you will need some type of file system for your cluster. I wrote a file system/storage survey article (http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/31/32/) for clusters in the past, but as always things change rather rapidly in the HPC arean. Originally, I had wanted to update the original article, however, the updates became so large that it's really an entirely new article. So this article, I hope, is a bit more in depth and a bit more helpful than the past file system article. Columns - FileSystems Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/232/ We recently received an email from Joe Springer asking a common question about clusters: Question: I want to run an application whose memory and disk requirements are larger than any one node. Could using a cluster allow me to run an application such that "memory" and disk needs are fulfilled by being distributed...? The short answer is: It depends for memory, yes for storage, but there is more to it than that ... FAQs - Ask The Monkey\'s Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:06:06 +0100 http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/231/2/ Time to buy that new lunch box The Georgetown University Advanced Research Computing (http://arc.georgetown.edu/) (ARC) has updated the training schedule (http://www.gridswatch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=16). In case you hvae not noticed, the ARC division has created a certification program for computer systems administrators wanting to advance in the field of high performance and high throughput computing. The Systems Administration Certification program consists of two required courses and a series of 1-3 day elective courses. The four-day Introduction to High Performance Computing is the required entry point to the program. Students with strong UNIX/Linux administration skills will complete this course able to plan, design, build, benchmark, and administer a Beowulf cluster. The current schedule is as follows: News - Select News Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:13:54 +0100 http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/230/2/ I call it a PCU not a GPGPU In case you have been hard at work on your latest breakthrough, there has been some news on the GPU processing front. What is GPU processing and why should I care you ask? The idea is rather interesting. Drawing pixels on screens is a parallel problem. Video card manufactures have taken advantage of this by placing many parallel graphics processors on their video chips. Current generation video chips now use General Purpose (GP) processors for this task. The "general purpose" feature means that graphics hardware can be now be used for parallel (predictable) computing problems. (i.e. an array multiplication is a predictable operation). You can find more background by consulting the article Pixels to PetaFLOPS: How GPUs are Pushing the HPC Envelope (http://www.linux-mag.com/id/3533) and GPGPU.org (http://www.gpgpu.org/) (General Purpose Graphical Processing Units). By the way, that is too many G's and P's for me. I like to think of it as heterogeneous computing or simply a Parallel Computing Unit (PCU). As an HPC geek, I like to think of it as PCU that can also do video, but in reality it is the other way around. We have the gamers to thank. So a big thank-you to those useless gamer types that everybody complains about. Keep playing (and buying) games and hardware. You are helping to subsidize the cure for all the ailments you will suffer from not going outside in your youth. News - Select News Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:52:20 +0100