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Scyld to Release Beowulf 2
grantedparole noted that Scyld has announced that they'll be releasing Beowulf 2 on tuesday. Scyld's CTO is none other then Don Becker. Presumably they'll be showing this off at ALS this week (ALS is the Atlanta Linux Showcase, and is probably the best of all the Linux shows. Since its in Atlanta, its also the only tradeshow that doesn't require me to take a connecting flight!).
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
...and this time, it's personal.
Sorry - couldn't resist it.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Looks interesting - a good, standard-ish Beowulf distribution with knobs on would be most appealing. But, my applications require large amounts of database-type searches against huge files that change rarely. I want to be able to store that data on the local drives of my cluster rather than shunt it around the machine. I don't think that is very easy to do at the moment... It would be nice if there were accepted ways to do that. Does anyone have any advice BTW?
"Scyld Beowulf's unified approach extends to the systems installation and boot designs. The operating system on cluster slave nodes is downloaded from the front-end computer. Only a minimal boot image on either a floppy, a CD, or the cluster node's hard disk is required for each cluster node. Once booted, cluster node configuration is controlled by the front-end"
This is a great feature.. You can upgrade the Kernel or Apps on the entire cluster by simply patching the Master Node..
I think it's time to start collecting old Compaq's again. But where will I put them all?
Pontiac
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Scyld's CTO is none other then Don Becker.
Umm, excuse my ignorance, but who is Don Becker, and why should it matter that he's the CTO? For one, titles are largely that, titles, and when someone tells me that I should be impressed by an upcoming product because of one person in a high-ranking position, I quickly sell any stock I might have in that company.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited as the next guy about the new release (the next guy's not that excited), but I don't really care who Don Becker if it's news that he's the CTO, it certainly isn't explained at all by this post.
Damn, beat me to the joke.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
From the kernel monte page it's obvious that only i386 architecture is supported. To bad they don't say it right away on the home page.
I mean, fer chrissakes, he has a 3 digit userid - do you honestly think he's a Beowulf troll? I'd say he's just taking the piss at the Beowolf trolls that he would have seen evolve over the years..
Think before you mod.
I think the traditional "could you make a Bowulf cluster out of those" joke is pretty Redundant (or inappropriate) on this article :)
:)
Please prove me wrong. I love those jokes on Slashdot
Just another coder...
Morons!
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
[Sorry about my other crap post...return in the subject textbox submits :( ]
MOSIX has transparent fork-and-forget process migration, but is a bitch to set up. It would be nice if the Beowulf-style setup (and process management tools) were available in a MOSIX like cluster. Beowulf is still for MPI apps and MOSIX is still for "normal" apps, but it will be interesting as these two products develop to see where they overlap...
Duuuuh, doesn't anyone remember the *story* Beowulf, from which the *computing engine* Beowulf gets its name?
Isn't it more likely to be named after Free Trader Beowulf from the roleplaying game Traveller, rather than from the poem based on nordic legends ?
No, he just runs a discussion based web site, which the trolls seem to insist on vandalising.
Are any mirror sites available? As many of you probably already know, trying to get into ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/beowulf-2.0-preview/RPMS/ is not a happening event. Thanks, dave
I wasn't trying to, honest, although it does seem to have worked as a troll. Hmmmm, I might start doing it to every story.....
*Cough* Who is this?
.sig is ontopic!
AFAIK, it _is_ named after the mythical dude that killed Grendel. Even if it isn't, it's still a rather cool name.
Hey, even my
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
It is from the classic poem
From their page
What does Scyld stand for? Is it an acronym?
-The name Scyld comes from the Beowulf legend. It also works out well as an acronym
http://www.scyld.com/FAQs.html
So if the name of the company is from the legend....follow me?
I stand corrected Its just I presumed the Traveller Beowulf would be known by more geeks than Beowulf the poem. Does that mean you get taught the poem at school in the US as well ?
Imagine there's no OS
It's easy if you try
No tasks below us
Above us only MPI
Imagine all the slave nodes
Living for today...
Imagine there's no software
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to sell or buy for
And no holy wars too
Imagine all the slave nodes
Computing in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the cluster will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for slow performance
A brotherhood of RAM
Imagine all the slave nodes
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the cluster will live as one
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
I still dig it though, and have actually read it several times on my own. (A cool modern Sci-fi adaptation is the beowulf series by Larry Niven, which include Beowulf's children and the Children of Heorot (released under a different name in the UK)).
rev
The signal-to-noise ratio has reached an all-time low with this discussion. Intelligent conversation has been replaced with immature rantings and stale jokes.
The whole site is now hopeless. The first amendment has a lot to do with it.
If they havn't worked out an easy method of getting computers properly beowulfed in an easy manner why are they working on another spec?
I would love to take a bunch of cheap computers and then connect them and use all their computational power to do various tasks but it's just really not that easy to do or set up. Seems that the only people who are using beowulf setups are scientific researchers that make their own configs from scratch.
Respond to s
The Scyld Beowulf-2 distribution you can buy from LinuxCentral.com is x86 only, but we support other architectures.
The only x86 specific feature is the cool "Two Kernel Monte", a kernel module which allows you load a new kernel(!). T-K-M is useful for any Linux system, not just for Beowulf.
The Alpha AXP is supported only with custom distributions because the Alpha requires a kernel matched to the specific motherboard type. That would mean two dozen CD-ROMs instead of just one.
We previously had Sparc-32 support, but that has been dropped. Beowulf is focused on price/performance. Sparcs are expensive and slow.
PowerPC support is planned. The Beowulf-2 system is based around BProc, which requires processor specific modifications to the kernel. For instance we add a new executable type to the kernel and "VMA dump" to save an executing program to a file or network stream. So it's way more than just a recompile to support a new architecture.
Karma can't be earned as it can only be handed out by the Cosmos
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Jump back, what's that sound?
Here it comes, case open power down.
Cold boot, running through the fs check.
Awesome parallel. Running on Intel.
Don't ya know I'm gonna 0wn SETI?
I'm gonna factor primes.
I'll find pi....
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf
Ain't nothing like it, a cruddy machine.
Take some old Pentiums and a Red Hat CD.
NIC cards, buy 'em by the crate and save.
Got some 100-base running through my bedroom.
Don't ya know I'm gonna 0wn SETI?
I'm gonna factor primes.
RC5....
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf
(spoken)
Yeah, we're running a little bit hot tonight.
I can barely see the screen from the heat comin' off of it.
I reach down, between my legs....
Pop the CD tray....
You're flustered. I'm clustered.
Like a Cray running in my closet now.
Got the boxes. Alan Cox's.
Mips a floppin', ain't no stoppin' now!
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf!
Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
I think I catch your singular wit. Traveller was a fun game, but obscure which makes yours a statement on the narrowminded monomeniacle lifestyle lead by geeks these days hilarious.
Surely I've been tempted to ask for a moderation value of "Writer should get more hobbies" since I feel like submiting that to about 1/3 of the posts I read here which are about imagionary dilemas and value systems that only work in a world without resources and economics.
MOSIX and "beowulf"-type clusters are totally different beats.
MOSIX just migrates the application to one computer, beowulf is about letting it run on many computers at the same time. To do the latter, the applications need to programmed differently - no matter how people would want it to be, someone needs to split the computation into parts which can be computed at the same time. Some operations can be done by compilers (like for loops without inter-dependecies in the data) and others (like some common linear algebra routines) can be placed in libraries, but there's not going to be an automatic system for parallellizing everything: Knowing what parts of the problem can be computed at the same time and what data is needed to do so will continue to be important for scientific apps.
There is no overlap.
sorry for the confusion.
Respond to s
Scary!
We have created a much easier to use and maintain cluster system!
Once the software has been installed on the front-end machine (which adds three Beowulf-specific questions to a standard install), adding a new compute node takes only a few seconds more than booting up the new machine. We even provide a button on the "beosetup" GUI to make boot floppies if your system won't boot from the network or CD-ROM.
Booting is fast because relatively little is initially transferred. The compute nodes typically run with about 40MB of cached library and configuration files.
This is not a NFS root scheme, which has even more complexity than setting up disk file systems. With BProc we actually eliminate most of the complexity rather just than moving it to some other place in the system.
I've already tried it 'festering'
Also....
Poached
Grilled
Simmered
Boiled
Skewered
Stewed
Gumbo
Jumbalaya
and in a hamburger bun....
My all time favorite is lightly sauteed with a white wine sauce
The name changed to be the "Annual Linux Showcase", not the Atlanta linux showcase. My guess is because it's not going to be in Atlanta
next year.
- Both systems allow processes to be migrated (MOSIX does this automatically, Beowulf has an application which does this + r_fork/r_exec)
- Both systems require all apps to have a consistant view of the filesystem
- Both can have an application running on many computers simultaneously, but the methodology is different (fork+IPC vs MPI)
Given that, Each of the clustering schemes are really just special cases of each other. I'm not suggesting they merge, but it would be nice for them to work together on things like cluster-wide filesystems and process migration issues.- post early
- start a new thread
- provide a link
- at least allege having read the story
your post gets moderated up.Something is really wrong with the moderation system here. It stimulates people to post early, even at the expence of quality of information.
I wish I had my mod points now. This has to be the single most idiotic, useless, unconstructive, narrow-minded, bigotted, stupid, load of crap I've ever read on /. (and that's up against pretty stiff competition). To quote Greg Stafford, you know very little, and what you know is wrong.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Remember when there was a big flamewar between Linus (+ LKML) and Donald over the development process Donald uses? As I recall, there were threats that the official maintainer of many NIC drivers in the Linux kernel tree was going to be switched from Donald to Jeff G(mumble) and Donald's contributions would no longer make it into the tree. Did that threatend action ever take place?
but why you chose to write your post that way is beyond me, exept that the self referencing is kind of quaint.
Thats the name of my new Distributed-OS-like OpenSource Projects. If you want a easy way to get the CPU power of anyone that load your page, this system is out, and works. 100% java, 100% opensource, SQL support, etc. Take a look at http://wk1300.8k.com/japps
If you would be interested in signing up for the troll mailing list, click here.
rev
Your idea for a moderation option of "Writer should get more hobbies" is pretty cool. Perhaps /. would settle for "Must get out more" but I guess that would require moderators wearing flame retardant underwear.
Out of interest Traveller was pretty big in the UK here (almost as big as D&D at one stage)
I guess it never caught on stateside though ?
(Bit weird considering you invented it ???)
Oh well back to writing a requirements spec...
Slashdot's great, the best excuse to avoid working I ever found....