[Beowulf] beowulf and X

[mark kandianis]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003 13:50:00 -0500 (EST), Robert G. Brown 
<rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, mark kandianis wrote:
>
>> hello
>>
>> i have a background in linux but not particularly beowulf.  i've lately
>> been recruited
>> to develop a graphics system for beowulf with xfree86 and twm.  is 
>> anyone
>> else doing this
>> out there?  also, how does beowulf get its graphics currently?  i could
>> not figure that out
>>  from the links on the site.
>
> What exactly do you mean?  Or rather, I think that defining your
> engineering goal is the first step for you to accomplish.  "Beowulf"
> doesn't get its graphics any particular way, but systems with graphical
> heads can be nodes on a beowulfish or other cluster computer design, and
> a piece of parallel software could certainly be written to do the
> computation on a collection of nodes and graphically represent the
> computation on a graphical head in real time or as movies afterward.
> Several demo/benchmarky type applications exist that sort-of demonstrate
> this -- pvmpov (a raytracing application) and various mandelbrot set
> demos e.g. xep in PVM.
>
> So to even get started you've got to figure out what the problem really
> is.  Do you mean:
>
>      Display                     "beowulf"
>
>   Graphics head =====network====head node 00
>                                 |node 01
>                                 |node 02
>                                 |node 03
>                                 |...
>
> (do a computation on the beowulf that e.g. makes an image or creates a
> data representation of some sort, send it via the network to the
> display, then graphically display it) or:
>
>   Graphical head node 00
>    |node 01
>    |node 02
>    |node 03
>    |...
>
> (do the computation where the graphical display is FULLY INTEGRATED with
> the nodes, so each node result is independently updated and displayed
> with or without a synchronization step/barrier) or:
>
>   ...something else?
>
> In each case, the suitable design will almost certainly be fairly
> uniquely suggested by the task, if it is feasible at all to accomplish
> the task.  It may not be.
>
>    rgb
>
> Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
> Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
> Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
> Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu
>
>

quite honestly if mosix can do it, it seems that xfree86 is already there,
so it looks like my question is moot. so i think i can get this up quicker 
than
i thought.

are there any particular kernels that are geared to beowulf?  or is this 
something
that one has to roll their own?

regards

mark




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