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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.
Through this year's Google Summer of Code (2008) funding, Gentoo
is laying down the groundwork for its first cluster-centric packages
and LiveCD. We're concentrating our efforts on providing media (CD/DVD)
from which one can boot a machine to take on the Master Node's role
which will also be provisioning slave nodes with NFS-mounted images.
This means: no HDDs required, no modification to that computer lab you
promised the techs you wouldn't touch!
Much of the project's emphasis is on retaining the original Gentoo
configuration approach so that the management of the cluster doesn't
differ from a regular installation. This also means that we stay as
close as possible to the upstream's code and implementation docs. In
essence, the ebuilds (Gentoo packages) resulting from this project will
be usable on any fresh Gentoo installation, taking care of the details
of initially setting up DHCP, NFS, PXE, centralized authentication
(LDAP), as well as pulling in some basic clustering packages and
utilities such as MPI libraries, profiling and benchmarking tools (yes,
we're looking into creating an ebuild for the Beowulf Performance Suite).
The current work environment is x86_64 with no specific optimizations so
the generated code will work on both AMD and Intel platforms (The master is not limited to booting nodes of its own architecture). But
since this is Gentoo, and we love building and tweaking our hardware to
sweats, the entire CD creation process can be reproduced and customized
by the use of a single command: catalyst. All files and instructions
required to reproduce the current iteration of the LiveCD are available
on the project's git repository (It is Linux style Alpha, this means it really is in development), this way, anyone can reproduce the
process, fine-tune it and even include personal code on the Live Medium.
Hopefully, the process will be simple enough to ease the sharing of the
actual execution environment to ease the comparison of actual code
performance and environment tweaking results.
If you want to help, you can contact Eric at: kyron (you know what to put here) neuralbs (and here) com.
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