Greetings Gentlemen!
What do you think of some of these ideas I had two years ago? Using client CPU cycles in a beowulf setup? Do today's everyday user apps need a shared memory? Are network latencys too high? Aggregating disks from the LTSP clients? From the CHANGELOG ClusterNFS looks dead. Are these aggregating ideas pie-in-the-sky?
Hello all-
I send greetings and thanks from Switzerland to all the contributors and
participants of this exciting project. I enjoyed meeting Ron and Glenn of the LTSP in Paris in
January. Special thanks to Jim McQuillan of LTSP for his rapid and thoughtful
technical support to the world. Also thanks to Paul Nelson, Eric Harrison, Chris
Hobbs, Steve Tonneson and team for their work for schools. BTW, your website
does not have an ABOUT US. I think this project has a very important future!
I've been poking around Beowulf sites lately, and found some that may be interesting to the project.
1. ClusteredNFS at http://ClusterNFS.sourceforge.net/ allows diskless clients
to grab files
based on computer hardware name, username, or all clients. I like the idea of
this file-level
user/hw abstraction, at least at first sight. It uses is server and clients
accessing the same
root-tree, which seems unnecessary, due to the cost of disks now. I think the
server should
have it's own tree for security and stability.
2. PVFS at http://parlweb.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs/ would be for LTSP nodes WITH
DISKS managed
and accessed centrally. Again, at first sight, this allows for aggregation of
clients disks
into one meta-disk. I assume a downside is, for most of my applications, that
all nodes would
need to be powered on all the time. An interesting idea might be a RAID layered
on top which
allows for some nodes to be on or off. It would not be super fast, but it could
be HUGE. With
Gigabit Ethernet on fast motherboards in a few years this may be more
interesting.
3. Beowulf at http://www.beowulf.org may have some application on LTSP if the
nodes are set
to execute LOCAL APPS, harnessing the power of all those processors. I have yet
to see any
every-day applications of Beowulf technology, but I am now experimenting. You
can get a free
shell account on a Beowulf at http://www.tsunamictechnologies.com/.
OT--
I saw this post of mine and Craig Sawyers' reply about using linuxrouter.org
from May 12, 1999, funny now:
>>
I am interested in setting up a cluster of 486 systems booting from a server
and running X. Although I doubt there will be any package out there soon, I'd
like to hear from others interested in this. Perhaps we could start a list or
website.
the reply:
Howdy. This can be done without too much work.. You can use a Debian based distro, called the Linux router Project. There is much documentation available on their web site:
http://www.linuxrouter.org
they build small little sets, that are easily expanded on. Once you get
one built, it's easy to move from one machine, and "clone" to a bunch of
others. you can use dd (Data Duplicator), or something similiar. dd is a
standard unix command...
Let me know if you run into any major problems.. the other thing you can do is, grab a base distro, like redhat, or debian, and just take out all the crap you don't want... and leave it a lean mean X machine :P
<<
Keep up the good work!
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