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Beowulf For Dummies?
Pheno writes: "This looks like a fun LUG project. A simple setup for a Linux cluster called OSCAR from the Open Cluster Group. The people behind it are Oak Ridge National Labs and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and some private companies. According to this Newsforge (part of the Keiretsu) story their 'Supercomputer on a CD' software is supposed to make it so easy to put a Beowulf cluster together a high school student or MCSE can do it in a few hours."
a beowulf cluster of dummies?
...a high school student or MCSE can do it in a few hours.
You expect too much of MCSEs.
I know it's probably a bit too much to expect journalistic integrity out of a site like Slashdot, but can you at least consider the possibility of perhaps posting at least one story that isn't chock-full of anti Microsoft/MCSE bigotry? In case you've forgotten, Slashdot has a huge readership, and you're likely to alienate a large percentage of that readership (and by extension, a large percentage of your banner ad viewership) with statements like the one you make about MCSEs. Has anybody ever explained the meaning of the word "objectivity" to you?
Sure, it's true that Microsoft includes a handkerchief with MCSE certificates so that graduates can wipe the drool off the corners of their mouths. Sure, MCSEs sometimes put their shoes on the wrong feet. Sure, they sometimes have difficulty remembering their middle names. But does any of that justify the sort of blind prejudice that you display in this article? The fact the the certificate is a useless piece of paper that will be obsolete in six months is no excuse for you to lash out at MCSEs the way that you have.
Shame on you.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Suffield Academy students, myself included (once upon a time, that is), attempted this about two years ago with PROJECT:EFFECT (sadly, the website is now-defunct). The goal of the project was to demonstrate that clustered supercomputing was an extremely viable, which we tried to prove by assembling a cluster of our own - from donated parts!
Anyhow, enough of me rolling in the past; just wanted to be an old man for a sec and yell "It's been done before, ya punks!!".
root_dev_X
bear with me, the sig is old....
===== Warble://VX
I, as a high school student, this comparison leaves me deeply insulted by this jab at our collective intelligence. This is an unfair and cheap shot at us, and as a 10th grader, I demand an apology from the Slashdot crew! Hell, the MCSE at my school was panicking after tech support for the firewall-in-a-box got him to cut off the web cam from outside access. Five minutes and a few remote logins to the firewall and webcam later, I had it all fixed up. Gimme a break.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
The smartest one I ever knew was a "Network Engineer" (his official designation from the technical school he graduated from.) Here's a story about him:
I was a System Administrator for a small (but growing) company - we had approx. 15 computers, most of them running Windows 3.11 (this was a few years ago..)
He came to me one day, said he was upgrading one of the stations to Windows95, and asked what the IP address for the station in shipping/receiving was.. so I told him. He came back a few minutes later, and said that the IP I gave him was wrong, because Windows said that the IP address was in use.. I was in the middle of something, so I told him I'd come see him in 10 minutes.
So I'm on my way to see him, I walk through the shipping area, and the computer is there, and someone is using it, so I figure he's figured out the problem he had with the address..
An hour later, he comes up to me and asks if I'd forgotten about him.. I told him that I saw the station running..
He says "Yes, but I'm gonna replace it, I have the new machine all set up on the network, but when I put in it's IP address, it doesn't work because it says another machine is using that address."
To which I reply "Of course it doesn't work, the old station is still running!"
His reply: "Oh, is that important?"
MCSE's are generally people who aren't smart enough to get a job with other skills.
...Beowulf for Dummies.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
. . . . . . Confessions of an MCSE . . . . . . .
Once upon a midnight quite particularly dreary
Since I chanced upon a net node that illuminated clearly
How to scrounge and hack together former CPU's that yearly
lose all function and so merely
waste the space upon your floor,
Since I chanced upon this web site that had promised so much more,
for the price of a For Dummy's book and a drive to the all-night store,
(for we all know that King Amazon ships slowly from off-shore),
then I swallowed hard, and knowing that what sleep I'd had before
would have to do for a day or two, as I readied to explore
this strange book, why then, astonished, on the cover this I saw:
How too bild a Beowulf clust-or
I dropped my jaw. What's the meaning of a spelling that so liberally spews
anti-publishing convention, anti-literally views
as early as the title-page?! With what shall I excuse
such an idiotic purchase?....or is it but a rouse
through the value of its shocking to get you to peruse
its contents? Who can know? I turned the page.
A CD-ROM! How helpful! I checked my former rage.
Reading on, I noticed these directions for the disk:
"Put it in, and execute drive-letter-setup-exec.
But do so at your personal and solitary risk."
That is all.
Alright, I said, that's clear enough, and further then I read.
but instead of more instructions, there was the same, in Spanish instead.
On I flipped, through German, French, and Chinese simplified
on through Russian, Japanese and Netherlandy Dutch beside,
on I flipped through all the Slavics, nay, all Indo-European
languages, then other groups, like Ugro-finnish Hungarean,
On through japanese, swahili, even African Tschadide
as escape I vainly tried,
but there was no end, until, at last, I reached: About the Authors.
So was this some get-rich scam meant but to fill the writers' coffers?
No returns on midnight offers.
Well, I sighed and looked again at that mysterious cd
I guess it could not hurt just to browse it for to see
whether any use in it at all there actually can be.
So I popped it in the drive-door,
browsed on over, and, well, gee:
One file was all there was: setup-dot-e-x-e.
Six hundred megs. I switched from root
to users more restricted
I went and clicked the execute
clutter-clutter, on it shifted!
my cd-rom, up,up it sped
my hard-drive whirled, and flashed its red
my system cluttered, clunked, and crappled,
as with this "huge" file it grappled
(what, you really don't suppose,
that the system slowness these expose,
isn't natural with the computer speed woes
that only clustering overthrows?)
So it thrashed and scuttled, a quarter hour,
When with an effort it found the power
to treat this MCSE dummy to an explanation
of why he could not yet achieve his clustering elation:
"OS not supported"
It dutifully reported.
Now it doesn't take my well-earned MCSE
To realize that Linux is bullshitting me
Windows 2000, you see,
Is our hallmark, it supports damn near every
worthwhile application:
And this then was my salvation.
At 4 AM I concluded
The merits of clustering had been refuted.
Our distribution is considerably more sophisticated than what OSCAR is attempting to do. The advances have lead to a simpler system to install and run.
Our distribution CD may be used as an install disk for the cluster master, or after 20 seconds it automatically boots the machine as a cluster slave and tries to contact a master. Once the master has been installed (about 20 minutes), each slave takes only a few seconds to join the cluster.
Look for our demos at LinuxWorld Expo next week, and our latest distribution is now available for $2 from LinuxCentral.com. You don't have to wait weeks or months for a less capable OSCAR system.