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Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?
Hell O'World writes: "Scientific American has a story on the history of Beowulf Clusters. It's written by the guys who built the Stone SouperComputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Nice example of how old hardware can be put to use to make new breakthroughs. Nothing radically new, but hey, it's 4AM Saturday morning, what do you expect. :)
For the moleth time?
The graphics card does not work while you're rendering. Only OpenGL/DX operations. :D
Just a few plugins for some platforms use hardware acceleration because it's very difficult to do this.
Memory bandwidth, its quantity and the processor are the main bottlenecks.
Render farms are made of raw power servers, probably with no graphics card attached.
Hope it helps
The incremental upgrades that they do are pretty slick. The StoneSouper is a heterogeneous cluster. Each hour the machines do a speed analysis on themselves to track their performance, then when new equipment comes in, they know which nodes to replace. Makes sense because at some point in time the electricity used by the slower nodes becomes very costly in relation to the amount of work contributed to the cluster as a whole. It is real slick, and as they point out, the cluster is always improving. It becomes better and better over time, unlike some conventional supercomputers which slowly lose their value over time.
That would make really cool mp3 server. Definatelly.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I can understand someone posting as AC with some hot information and/or opinion. But not one making stupid replies.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I work for a company that writes middleware for clusters and I get to work on them every day of the week.
I just wouldn't use ethernet to connect such a large machine. TCP/IP for message passing is by far not the best choice for making a collective of machines talk to each other. Also PVM is not the only choice anymore. Try MPI.
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/
where can I find a copy of the November, 1950 issue of Scientific American, cover story: the WORLDS FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER (Berkeley's Simon)?? (And no, I can't imagine a cluster of those).
Overrated/Offtopic/Inciteful/Flamebait (-4)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Don't you mean a 20 inch endoscopy?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Hello, you just repeated the joke that was the article title. Who modded this up?
4 AM Saturday afternoon? :)
Actually, I just got back from a bachelor party, where we got our soon-to-be-married friend very intoxicated indeed. A brief lesson in bad liquor:
--Goldschlager - bad
--Jagermeister - awful
--Shots of half Jager, half Goldschlager - not as bad as either one alone
Strange, isn't it.
No, Taco hasn't beaten anyone in weeks. But we do try to not go too long without posting anything, and most of the time there's something reasonably interesting to post. But Friday night/Saturday morning, well, those can be tough.
:)
Hint to people who want to have their stuff linked on slashdot: submit the story friday night, saturday or sunday. Your odds are better.
I still don't see the difference between what is described and what a well-administered UNIX computer lab on a private network should be, with PVM installed, consoles removed, and login authorized only on a single node.
In truth, there really isn't any difference. Beowulf is the name of a concept, not a product, package, or even method. (Beowulf clusters can be based on PVM, MPI, or other message backbones, for instance - although PVM is probably the most common, there's no standard for Beowulf clusters.)
BTW, this stuff works - I replaced a Cray with a cluster of FDDI-connected RS/6000's nearly a decade ago and today, we use Intel boxes or an IBM 390 CMOS mainframe, depending on the job to be done. (You'd never know I'm a Sun bigot from reading that last sentence...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
God damnit, I'm gunna get karma burned for this but... I've spammed my beowulf cluster here on here many times before. Unfortunatly my host is dead and he hosts all the files so I can't mirror it somewhere else. Some day my 13 node beowulf cluster that rendered images in povray shall arise again! The site is http://beowulf.alignment.net ... I think it'll load if you get the IP which I have no idea.
To sum it up my geek friends and I built a beowulf cluster from spare parts sitting in the back of our high school storage area. 10 486's and 3 P2-200mhz Debian boxes powered PVMPov and allowed us (Me specifically since I'm the POV-Ray guy of us) to do distributed raytracing over the cluster.
Now if only I could get that website up you could see all the pictures and videos we made...
Argh, I'm gunna feel the karma burn.
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Check out my blackbox styles
If not on the other side of the globe, at least on the other side of the country! There's plenty of drunk californias your should hire!
How we know is more important than what we know.
every single day, now I'm seriously drunk, I've moved from beer to rum and now I'm onto wine.
How we know is more important than what we know.
6AM pictures of Natalie Portman
7AM hot grits for breakfast.
Nothing radically new...
I guess hard drives will be breaking the 1GB barrier any day now!
C'mon slashdot, let's post some real news.
Ahhhh...if only I had an excuse to setup my own cluster. I guess I can speak for most geeks when I recall the first time I heard of clustering commodity, off the shelf equipment with this ROGUE operating system called Linux...it still brings a warm feeling.
Love live the Cluster!
What I would like to see happen with beowulf research is for everybody to connect their clusters via the internet (the proverbial Beowulf of Beowulfs) and go for the Holy Grail - the simulation of consciousness within the human brain. Folks, we are already using clusters of computers to search for consciousness...that's what SETI@Home is. But space is big, and very empty, and our odds of finding ET are small. Let's start a public project to search for HAL instead. Here is what we know about the brain. Here is the place to scratch the surface on how we think it generates consciousness. We are geeks, we are hackers, we joke endlessly anout Beowulfs of Beowulfs...what are we waiting for?
And for you young whippersnappers out there that don't remember the day Kennedy got shot and the rest of the 1960s (what a decade) here's the scoop on the Shell Answer Man, which would be a pretty good Beowulf project in and of itself....
Still more on the Shell Answer Man!!!
this is a test post
what else do people use computers for?
Hey, slashdot moderation works!
/. EDITOR seems to have a karma of below 25.
At least, that's the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that a
Hmm... wait a moment. Maybe moderation doesn't work. Given all the trolling, redundant stories, and flamebait produced by the editors, I don't know if they should even be posting at Score=1.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This cluster is relatively small: 133 nodes. At my university they had a 250-node cluster up for a day during the lustrumcluster project. They wanted to have a 365-node cluster (the number of years that the university exists), but had trouble getting enough machines. A friend of mine (who was a member of the group that built it) told me that it equaled an 99Ghz intel machine (they used 250 intel machines with procs around 400 Mhz)
:-)
So, this cluster is relatively small
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Thanks, I was just about to point that out :) "Unique" means one of a kind, so either there is something else like it (making it not unique) or there's not.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
A Beowulf cluster *requires* that only one terminal is used for login, and that the rest are just CPU's and memory with a network connection. We want to harness CPU power, and the rest (monitors, keyboards) are just excess baggage.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
...the editors are actively apologizing for their stories WHILE posting them.
What about a Beowulf cluster of ... er, nevermind. Sorry.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I only read /. for the porno links.
Read the Final Fantasy article. Yeah, yeah, I know it's Katz, just skip down to the comments.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
OK, where is it written that you must post an article at 4 AM anyway? Will CmdrTaco just beat you mercilessly if you don't? If its something you realize you have to apologize for, try just not posting it. This article I don't particularly mind, but just for future reference. Thanks.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
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// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
What would you do with a cluster? Seriously.
I hear this A LOT. There are even ISPs in my area that advertise their clusters. I honestly can't think of a reason why the -average- geek (and by definition, most of us geek -are- average) would need a cluster in his home, especially with PCs with CPU clockspeeds in the GHz range. Perhaps an MP3 machine in the living room and a nice fileserver tucked away in the wiring closet, but no need for a cluster.
That's not to say clusters aren't of use.... they're wonderful cheap solutions for certain supercomputing tasks and are awesome for most forms of rendering. BUT... that doesn't mean every one of us needs an 8-node cluster to render the 3D images we make in Blender about four times a year. Nor is a cluster a magic fairy wand that can turn a pile of older, slower PCs into one magical, fast, new PC. It's not that easy. There is no free lunch. Programming for parallel processing is no simple task and adapting an existing project for a cluster can be extremely painful work at best. I'll leave "distributed GNOME" to someone else.
Just what is a real cluster? I've looked through all "Beowulf" documentation I could find...
I don't belive there is a *proper* published, accepted usage of the term, "Beowulf". And you're correct, it is interesting how the kids are just now discovering distributed computation.
It may also be worth noting that "Beowulf", when used in a converstation, is often followed by "Schweeet", and is mostly said by l33d d00d wannabes in their prepubescent years. (Or by buzzword kings of any age).
What is more important for a render farm, the processor or the graphics card? Because when you distribute something for rendering across the nodes, would it be handled by the processors of the node or the GPU on the graphics card?
CPU and Memory bandwidth, by far. You don't even need a graphics card on cluster nodes, as the graphics will never be used. Rendering is purely a CPU operation and thus is slow, but results in a far better image than your graphics card could ever dream of producing. The best your graphics card can do is lower-quality real-time previews. The better the graphics card, the better quality of the real-time imagery. A Quadro2 Pro, FireGL4, or Wildcat II can produce some mighty nice real-time images when modeling and previewing your 3D graphics, but are nowhere near as nice as the final rendered product. There really is no way to put your graphics card to use as a "coprocessor" in the rendering process, either, as rendering software and your graphics card differ greatly in the way they produce their images. Think of your Geforce 3 as "quick, lossy, and cheap" and a render sever (or cluster) as "slow, lossless/beautiful, and expensive".
What truly scares me is how folks like this are lusting over something they could never even utilize. I could *maybe* understand someone's desire for a Cray (and even that's a stretch), given the company's interesting history (and even more interesting founder, Seymour Cray). But a cluster of PCs?? What's so great about having racks upon racks filled with x86 systems sitting in your den that will recieve little or no use? And really, what's so great about a Cray in your own home? What are you going to run on either? Distributed TTYGNOME? And no, you're not going to be able to recompile the Linux kernel in two seconds with -any- cluster. You're better off builing a nice desktop PC and a companion server. Lust over the 100 GHz PC that you'll be running in just 8 years.
For the 6.022x10^23rd time, not all clusters are "Beowulf Clusters".
I didn't see any mention of the best Beowulf clutstering project of Macs, so to "Think Different": Project Appleseed, put together by the physics department at UCLA. They've accomplished phenomenal speeds, etc.; mostly, it's just as possible on Macs as it is on anything else.
In fact, they have even developed a drag-n-drop interface for setting up Beowulf jobs.
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$tar -xvf
Even better is the moderation: 4, Redundant. No kidding!
sulli
RTFJ.
I didn't think anyone still listened to the Beatles...
*whispers* a little known secret about beer... if you stay single, the last cold beer is always yours ;o)
*hehe* c'mon... catch up... we're going out drinking...
a Beowulf Cluster of suggestions to /. for future articles?
- "First Posts!" has been mentioned already.
- Natalie Portman has been mentioned already.
So that leaves us with:
- Hot Grits and their influence on the liberal mindset, by JonKatz
- Microsoft sucks!, by Hemos
- Penis birds: extinct, or merely migrating somewhere else?, submitted by the goatse.cx guy (rejected)
Uhh... let's leave it at that, for now.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
COMPUTING CLUSTER at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City contains 560 Pentium III microprocessors.
I saw this story and immediately thought of slashdot and how funny it would be to submit a story like this. But I stopped at the thought.
Am I missing something?
Beowolf cluster articles and posts???
Screw 3...
Hey, Hell, thanks, that was a nice article. Although the Beowulf cluster has become pretty commonplace, I don't think I've actually seen a history of clusters before.
When computers get together to make decisions, they form a Beowulf cluster. When humans get together to make decisions, they form a comittee. Need I say more?
4 A.M., Saturday - Article on the history of Beowulf clusters.
Now, let's look into the future....
5 A.M., Saturday - Article on the history of First Posts.
Who know knows what 6 A.M. will hold?
...or should it be called a Beowulf cluster cluster?
Have any of you read the Beowulf poem? That poem rawks. I know many a-kid who didn't like reading at all until he/she picked up our senior English Literature book. I liked it so much, I rented the book from the Library. If you've not read the poem, I'd suggest reading it. Good stuff.