On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Lux, Jim (337C) <[email protected]> wrote: > The classic: nothing beats a station wagon full of tapes for bandwidth. > (today, it's minivan with terabyte hard drives, but that's the idea)
BTW, I've heard horror stories related to routing errors with this method - truck drivers delivering wrong tapes or losing tapes (hopefully the data is properly encrypted). > Notwithstanding that there ARE places that do cycle harvesting from > desktop machines, but the management and sysadmin hassles are so extreme > (I've written software to DO such harvesting, in pre-Beowulf days). The technology part of cycle harvesting is solvable, the accounting part is (IMO) much harder. A few years ago I talked to a University HPC lab about deploying cycle harvesting in the libraries (it's a big University, so we are talking about 1000+ library desktops). The technology was there (BOINC client), but getting the software installed & maintained means extra work, which means an extra IT guy... and means no one wants to pay for this. I wonder how many University labs or Biotech companies are doing organization wide cycle harvesting these days, for example, with technologies like BOINC: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ > Where an Amazon could do themselves a favor (maybe they do this already) > is to provide a free downloadable version of their environment for your > own computer, AMI is not private (in the end, it is IaaS, so the VM images are open). In fact, StarCluster has AMIs for download & install (mainly for developers who want to code for StarCluster locally): http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/download_amis.html And one can roll a custom StarCluster AMI and upload it to AWS, such that the image settings are optimized to the needs: http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/0.91/create_new_ami.html > or some "low priority cycles" for free, to get people hooked. AWS Free Usage Tier -- (most people just use the free tier as free hosting): http://aws.amazon.com/free/ Rayson ================================= Grid Engine / Open Grid Scheduler http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net > Sort of like IBM providing computers for cheap to universities in > the 60s and 70s. Razors, razor blades. Kindles, e-books. Subsidized > cellphones, 10 cent text messages. Give us your child 'til 7, and he's > ours for life. > > >> > > _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
