Site News

News about site issues lives here. Contests, updates, poll results, and you name it show up in this category. We'll also keep you informed about our public appearances so you can camp out the night before to be the first in line.

A quick note about some cool new features we are adding to ClusterMoneky. First, we have a new white paper repository. This repository will provide exclusive content that is only available to registered users. Registering on ClusterMonkey is simple (read below for more information on the registration rationale). If you have not already, go to the Registration Page and register (Name, email, and password, that is it!). When you are logged in, a "Downloads" item will appear in the blue main menu box on the left side of the page.

When you click on the "Downloads" link, you will be able to download:

  • Introducing Limulus Hadoop - Learn about the capabilities of a true desk-side Hadoop workstation. Complete with benchmarks.
  • The Limulus HPC Appliance - Learn about the exciting capabilities of the cool, quiet, and fast personal HPC appliance. Includes HPL and NAS benchmarks
  • HPC for Dummies (2nd Edition) - a freely available book from AMD published a few years ago. Provides a good intro to HPC.
More papers and exclusive content will be available in the future.

As one of the last three readers of Cluster Monkey, do not despair. I apologize for the rather low frequency of content over the last ten months. It is entirely my fault. I have been so busy with some other projects, Cluster Monkey got lost. I have not had time to post interesting news or write any articles. This situation is about to change.

From the secret double bonus department

A somewhat un-publicized feature of Cluster Monkey are the PDF documents that registered users can download. These documents include white papers on Limulus Personal computing, a brief book called HPC for Dummies and the PowerPoint slides describing the 3D printing at SC19. To download any of the files you need to register with your email address. When logged in, a Downloads item will appear in the blue Main Menu area on the top left of the page. There you will find the materials.

We ask for your email because we are working on starting two low frequency newsletters covering HPC and Hadoop/Spark. We explain how we treat your information in our Privacy Policy. Also, as a registered user you can leave comments on articles. Cluster Monkey is a community based web-site.

One of our newest documents is a white paper comparing an on-prem Limulus personal appliance to Amazon Cloud instances. The economics are quite interesting. You can also find the slides from our 3D printing demonstration at SC19 and a 2018 white paper on building a Modern Scalable Analytics Classroom--on-prem/no data center needed.

From the "hello is anybody in there" department

A good question. The short answer is "not quite done." As editor, I have been busy on two fronts: co-authoring a new book on Hadoop 2 and YARN and the Limulius Project. The book should be out in March and there will be Cluster Monkey coverage of how Hadoop 2 can play nice with things other than MapReduce. On the Limulus front, an Intel i7 Limulus now is a hair's breath away from half a TFLOPS of HPL performance (498.3 GFLOPS). That is double precision CPU FLOPS, not GPU FLOPS. These systems perform with a record breaking $15.55/GFLOPS and 0.83 Watts/GFLOPS -- next to your desk!

Faster, better, cheaper, and hopefully not too broken

In case you have not noticed, we look different. There have been massive upgrades in the monkey kingdom. The front end is new and hopefully faster -- the template name was afterburner so it better be fast. And, because we are technical monkeys we kept the clean simple look with the focus on good content. To that end, we have tried to keep article presentation dense and clean (i.e. you can read more than two short paragraphs before hitting the next page button). The front page now has most of the widget type things on the left and content links on the right including the latest and popular articles links, a poll, and syndicated links to popular sites and blogs. As with our previous format, the  stories are in the middle. We also are thankful to our sponsors who support us in keeping the banner advertisements to a minimum.

The backend server and delivery platform (Joomla) have been upgraded as well. Overall things should work much more smoothly and allow us to offer more features (see below). Unfortunately there were a few glitches with the upgrade. Content was automatically converted and it seems most of it came through just fine. We could not transfer the old comments, howerver. As  time permits we will attempt to manually copy them from the old site. The polls also had problems and we need to write a script to convert to the current polling platform (or we may just archive some screen shots of the old poll results). Similarly a picture display module needs to be upgraded so we can recover some Beobash snapshots.

Overall, things went better than expected and the new hardware and software have put us in a good position for growth. Speaking of which, we are planing some new things. First, more content is in the works as well as some new features. Later this year we will be starting a monthly newsletter presenting technical webinars (free) to site subscribers (sign-up now on the left). We have a few other ideas we want to try out as well.

Our goal is to provide open quality cluster and High Performance Computing (HPC) information to our readers. We hope that the information generates discussion and conversation within the HPC community and enables users, administrators, and managers to benefit from the art and science of  HPC clustering.

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